Wanna Help Jim Woodring Build a Big-Ass Pen?
July 15th, 2010
When one the greatest cartoonists of our time decides he wants to build a seven foot long dip pen, y’gotta answer the call!
Check out the video. It’s actually a terrific idea and worth the Herculean effort it will take to pull it off.
Meanwhile, if you don’t have Jim’s gorgeous new book Weathercraft yet, well… what are you waiting for?
link via Fantagraphics.
March 3, 2021
I like his spiel, but I question the project’s basic conception. You can’t just scale up a pen. Woodring recognizes this, noting that the surface tension which keeps ink flowing smoothly in an ordinary dip pen won’t function at the scale he’s planning. He’s hoping to come up with a workaround, but really—if you re-engineer it with an ink reservoir etc. you’re not creating a six-foot dip pen. You’re creating a something more closely related to a Uniball pen.
That’s exactly what was bothering me about it, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
I also see your point there. That said, I think it would be amazing if he could make it happen. The demonstration value of this alone and the performance-art value, would just be … well, heck, I’d go and see it.
If I weren’t flat busted I’d’ve given him $25 already. That would just look so cool if it could come to be.
I don’t know…I have enough ass-pens already…
Oh. Oh! I get it.
Maybe he could make it more like a cartridge pen somehow that seems both a little more feasible and awesomely primitive.
maybe if he made a lot of perforations rather than just one big hole, it would be a nib with network of a hundred capillary channels, rather than just one, the groove could look like an upside-down tree. That might work.