Dino’s Journal 📖

Tried using a pencil on my Bullet Journal yesterday. I got a no. 2 pencil from the office supply room, a basic pencil from Staples. Was an interesting test. I've forgotten how it feels to write using a pencil. It feels nice! The way the pencil just glides over the paper, it feels so much better than using a pen. I could write way faster and it didn't smear at all. And if I make a mistake, I can just do a CTRL+Z with the eraser. Brilliant.

My main reason for trying a pencil, is to see if it smears. The pens that I have, a Pilot G-2 and a Pentel Energel both with 0.7 tips, flow really well but the ink takes awhile to dry. It is unfortunate really because the black ink from those pens look really vibrant. It really pops out on the white pages of my Leuchtturm 1917 and makes the lines written with the pencil look bland.

Unfortunately, since I write really small and really quickly, I end up smearing the ink more often than not. I just sometimes don't have the patience to wait for the ink to dry. The Pentel Energel is already supposed to be a quick drying pen, but it still smears when I write quickly.

Both the pencil and pen have their pros and cons.

• Pencil
  • To me, the act of writing feels so much better with the pencil. There is no smearing and I can write as fast as I want to. My penmanship, though never really good to begin with, seems to look and flow much better when using a pencil.
  • However the lines on my journal seemed harder to read as it is not as vibrant as those written with pens.
• Pen
  • Writing with a pen produces lines that are really nice to look at. I feel like they are easier to read because the lines are so much clearer with ink. There is also this feeling of permanence that I get from writing entries using the pen.
  • However the ink tends to smear a lot because of the way I write. I've actually now taken to dabbing the newly written lines with a paper towel to reduce the chances of smearing. Obviously this increases the time before I can write a new line, but it seems like a good compromise for now until I find better pens to work with.

Tags: #BulletJournal