Ohto Graphic Liner Drawing Pens are easy to use and have durable tips.

The Ohto Graphic Liner combines the best features of metal- and plastic-tipped technical drawing pens with very little compromise. Its secret is a metal rollerball tip. This tip makes it as easy to use at natural drawing angles as plastic-tipped pens, so it’s accessible for beginners. However, just like traditional metal-tipped technical pens, the tip won’t wear down, fray, or flex. The one drawback of the rollerball tip is that the ink occasionally pools around the ball and forms a slightly wider spot at the ends of lines.

As a disposable pen, the Ohto Graphic Liner requires no maintenance and is easy to grab and go. It has dark, waterproof pigment ink that is also Copic proof and archival quality. This makes it a good choice for multi-media art and work that is intended to last a long time. It comes in several tip sizes.

• What is a Technical Drawing Pen?
• Technical Drawing Pen Considerations
• Technical Drawing Pen Recommendations
  • Beginner Technical Drawing Pens
  • Intermediate Technical Drawing Pens
  • Advanced Technical Drawing Pens
• Uses for Technical Drawing Pens
• How to Take Care of Technical Drawing Pens
• Technical Drawing Pen Test Results
• Compare These Pens
• How We Approach Research & Testing
• Other Resources
• Conclusion

Sakura Pigma Microns boast a variety of tip sizes.

The tips of technical drawing pens range from a miniscule 0.03 mm to a bold 1.5 mm. Each tip produces a line of a single width, and different pens can be used together to accentuate each other. Small tips can produce meticulous details but must be treated delicately to avoid damage. Larger tips are more durable and allow for a richer ink flow. Their thick lines are perfect for outlines and bold letters.

Some technical drawing pens use a naming scheme that does not correspond to a millimeter measurement. The numbers on these pens, such as 003 or 05, express their relative tip size. A pen with the number 003 has a tip size similar to 0.15 mm, while the tip size of a 05 pen is comparable to 0.45 mm. You can check the millimeter tip size of each of these pens on their respective product pages on our website.

In addition, some manufacturers measure the tip width while others measure the line produced. Most metal tips are measured by the line produced and give a finer line than plastic tips of the same measurement.

Almost like fountain pens, cartridge versus bottle is a key question to ask yourself when selecting a technical drawing pen.

Reusable pens may use either a bottle- or cartridge-based filling system. Pens that use bottled inks allow you to experiment with different inks or dilute the ink you already have to achieve color gradients. Keep in mind that you should only use inks intended for use with technical drawing pens or fountain pens as other inks may damage the pens. Bottled inks are also more economical over time. The downside of this filling system is that ink bottles are easy to spill during refilling and transport.

If you’re concerned about messes or travel frequently, cartridges are a better bet. They are easy to install and contain the ink safely. However, they lock you into the ink provided by the manufacturer and are more expensive in the long run.

These reliable, inexpensive pens let beginners try technical drawing pens without the commitment of large price tags or maintenance.

These reusable pens are more durable than their disposable counterparts and have a higher upfront cost. Since you don’t have to replace the entire pen every time you run out of ink or bend a tip, they are less expensive and more environmentally friendly in the long run.

If you have a set of these technical drawing pens, you’ll never need another. With proper care, these high-quality metal-tipped pens will perform impeccably for many years. Their highly pigmented inks, range of tip sizes, reliable quality, and manufacturer warranties make them ideal for professional use.

Technical drawings and blueprints require precise lines, mathematical accuracy, and perfect details. When a single mis-drawn line could mean a misplaced support beam, the tools for drawing need to be as sharp as the minds using them. The technical drawing pen was created to meet these requirements, with needle-point tips for use with templates and reliable fine lines for meticulous details. Even with the advent of computer-aided design, these pens are still widely used by engineers, architects, and other designers. Metal-tipped technical pens are the best tools to achieve this high level of accuracy.

Products Used: Koh-I-Noor Rapidosketch 0.35

Scientific & medical illustrations are often used instead of photographs for educational use, journal publications, and even court cases. In order to represent subjects accurately while making the piece as clear and useful as possible, illustrators carefully render important details and leave out elements that may distract the eye. They go to great lengths to ensure the accuracy of their art and often use a technique called stippling to achieve lifelike dimension. Technical drawing pens are ideal for this technique, as it involves the precise placement of many tiny dots.

Products Used: Rotring Isograph 0.5, Sakura Pigma Micron 005, Sakura Pigma Micron 01 (Purple)

Type design is the process of creating a readable, beautiful, and coherent font. To achieve these results, many typographers use guides and templates before drawing each letter on vellum or tracing paper. Technical pens work especially well on these translucent papers, giving typographers clean edges and bold lines for a perfect font.

Products Used: Ohto Graphic Liner 02, Rotring Isograph 0.5

Artists of all kinds love technical pens for their unchanging line widths, small tip sizes, portability, and reliability. Their needle-point tips allow technical pens to be used with rulers and templates, and they are perfect for drawing the finest details. Artists who work with watercolors or other water-based media count on the waterproof ink used in technical drawing pens to keep their lines crisp.

Comic artists also use technical pens for lettering due to their even line weight and reliable flow. While all technical drawing pens are well suited for comics and manga, the Sakura Pigma Micron and Copic Multiliner pens are the most common choice among comic artists because of their fine line weight and more forgiving plastic tips.

Products Used: Copic Multiliner SP 0.3

Reusable metal-tipped pens need to be cleaned periodically to prevent any buildup of dried ink. We recommend cleaning your pens about every two weeks if you are using them regularly, whenever you change inks, or any time they aren’t working properly. You should also clean out any ink that’s left in your pens if you don’t plan to use them for a while to prevent dried ink from clogging the narrow pen tips.

If your pen came with cleaning instructions, follow them when maintaining your pen. The process is similar to cleaning a fountain pen, but you need to be extra careful not to damage the delicate nib. If your pen did not come with cleaning instructions, this process should do the trick:

1. Disassemble

Disassemble all the parts except the nib. We do not recommend disassembling the nib as this may void the pen’s warranty and risks bending the internal wire.

2. Rinse

Rinse the nib and any other soiled parts with water until no more ink comes out. If you are doing this at a sink, make sure to plug the drain to avoid losing small pieces.

3. Soak

Soak the pen parts in a cup of water. Keep changing the water as it becomes saturated with ink until it stays clear for an hour. You can purchase special cleaning bulbs for some pens that force water through the tip to clean it more thoroughly, similar to flushing a fountain pen with a converter.

4. Dry

Allow all of the parts to dry completely before filling them with ink and reassembling the pen. You can speed this up by tapping the parts gently to remove excess moisture and drying them with q-tips. Do not tap the pen tip against anything or you will damage it.