7 Best Brush Pens for 2022

Hi WashiGang Crew! It's WashiGang team member, Emily, here! This week we're testing and reviewing our favourite brush pens in the shop! Brush pens are great for calligraphy, hand lettering, sketching, art drawing, colouring and doodling! Read more to find out our 7 Best Brush Pens for 2022 and see our latest pen test video on Youtube!

What is a brush pen?

A brush pen is a pen that has a soft flexible tip that is similar to a paint brush. The brush tip allows you to create different textures and line widths. A brush pen creates smooth flowing lines, which can be controlled depending on the angle and pressure that you use with the brush pen. You can also create different textures depending on how long the brush is. A longer brush is softer and can create a wider variety of lines. A shorter brush is firmer and is easier to control. Brush Pens come in a range of styles and colours, from different brush lengths, to firmness and types of ink and brush materials.

What can you use a brush pen for?

Brush Pens are used for hand lettering, calligraphy, colouring, art journaling and art works. Due to the larger surface area of a brush tip, brush pens have a more inky flow, which makes them good for colouring larger surface areas and creating smooth flowing lines. The fine tip of a brush pen is also good for colouring narrow corners and line-work. Brush pens are great for calligraphy, lettering and art works, as you can create a variety of lines in different thicknesses depending on the angle and pressure of your pen. With a brush pen, you can create thin and delicate lines with the tip of the pen or bold, thick lines by using more of the brush, which is well suited to creative uses. Brush pens can also be used expressively, to create textured lines and smooth flowing gestures in art works.

Here are our 7 Favourite Brush Pens for 2022:

Fudenosuke Soft Tip Brush Pen

The Soft TIp Fudenosuke Brush Pen has a soft flexible brush tip and uses a water-based, pigment black ink. The soft brush tip allows you to create a variety of line thicknesses and textures by changing the pressure or angle fo the pen, which makes it great for calligraphy, hand lettering and art drawings.

The Soft Tip Fudenosuke Brush Pen is one of my favourite pens to sketch and draw with. Due to the soft tip, I find myself able to create more free and abstract lines, textures, fine details and thicker bolder lines for sketching and creating illustrations.

Due to the soft tip, it's takes some more practice to gain control of the lines and use the pen in a way that you want to. Once dry, you can colour over the lines without smudging. The ink is fairly quick drying as well.

Find Fudenosuke Soft Tip Brush Pens here!

Fudenosuke Hard Tip Brush Pen
The Hard Tip Fudenosukde Brush Pen has a firm, but flexible brush tip with water-based, pigment black ink. This brush pen is great for finer details and creates fine-medium thickness lines. The firmer tip makes it easier to control this brush pen than the soft tip brush pen. I also love to use this pen for doodling, art drawing and sketching. With more control over the line work, I often use this pen for outlines of illustrations, drawing lines, graphs and grids in my bullet journal, doodling and hand lettering titles and headings in my bullet journal.

The ink dries quite quickly and can be coloured in without smudging.

Find Fudenosuke Hard Tip Brush Pens here!

Dingbats Atopen:
The Dingbats Atopen Dual Tip Fine Liner/Brush Pens are archival quality, fade proof, acid-free, lightfast, waterproof, bleed proof, Xylene-free and odourless. I'm a really big fan of these pens and I think they're underrated! They're so vibrant, they're great for colouring, doodling and lettering! I have used these pens a lot and haven't noticed any fraying of the brush tip, which is a big plus for brush pens!

Compared to Tombow Dual Brush Pens - the fine liner tip is finer and the brush end is similar, but has a slightly firmer brush and thinner brush point.

The packaging is made from 100% recycled materials. The pens can also be recycled after use! For information on how to recycle your pens click here.

Find Dingbats Atopens here!

Tombow Dual Brush Pen
The Tombow Dual Brush Pen is a classic favourite pen amongst designers, hand letterers and bullet journalers! They are water based, acid free and non-toxic. I love this pen for lettering and colouring. It has a strong but flexible brush tip, which means that it will keep it's shape after use and makes them a great pen for beginners as well! I find that they have a great ink flow for colouring larger areas, as well.

Tombow Dual Brush pens are water based, so can be blended together easily and can also be used with water brushes and blenders to create a water colour effect.

The best thing about Tombow Dual Brush Pens is the wide range of colours they come in!

To prolong the use of your Tombow Brush Pen, I would recommend using on smooth non-textured paper, such as in a bullet journal, as heavy and regular use with rough paper (such as rough water colour paper or textured paper) may cause the brush tip to fray over time.

Find Tombow Dual Brush Pens here!

Mildliner Brush Pen
The Mildliner Brush pens are my favourite for bullet journaling and planning. Mildliner Brush pens contain a pigment based ink that is water resistant and acid free. I love to use these for highlighting, writing and decorating my bullet journal pages. The fine tip is also an enjoyable marker to write with in your bullet journal!

These pens have a slightly translucent ink that is excellent for layering, and highlighting over other pens and doesn't bleed through. The colour range is very subdued and muted and are great for creating a specific look. 

Out of all of the brush pens I've tested, these have no shadowing through the page, which is why I love to use them for colouring in and in journals and planners!

Find Mildliner Brush Pens here!

Karin Brushmarker Pro Brush Pen
The Karin Brushmarker Pro Brush Pens in my opinion are real art pens! The colours are vibrant and they're so inky and juicy! They flow beautifully and are perfect for creating a watercolour or hand painted effect. Create artworks, greeting cards, art journal entries and hand lettering, with bold and vibrant colours, with these pens.

The BrushMarker Pro pen uses non-toxic, water-based ink, with either dye-based or pigment-based ink (for neon colours) and has a super durable, flexible nylon brush tip. You can also lighten colours, blend colours or create tonal transitions by contacting the tips of the markers together or using a blender pen.

As these are so wet, we recommend using a thicker paper to avoid bleeding or shadowing and allow some time for pen strokes to fully dry if you don't want them to blend, smudge or transfer to other pages in your bullet journal.

Find Karin Brushmarker Pro Brush Pens here!

Pentel Brush Sign Pen
The Pentel Brush Sign pen has a flexible felt-tip brush that's ideal for lettering as you can create a range of thick and thin lines with this pen. It's a relatively thin brush pen compared to all of the brush pens in this list.

It has a water-based dye ink, is made in Japan and is a great beginner-friendly brush pen. I would recommend giving a short moment for the ink to dry, to avoid smudging or unwanted transferring.

Find Pentel Brush Sign Pens here!

So that you can see how each brush pen writes, we also made a brush pen test video for you! Watch the full brush pen test via Youtube!

Thanks so much for reading about our 7 Best Brush Pens for 2022! If you'd like to check out our full range of brush pens, you can shop more brush pens here!

Do you use brush pens? What is your favourite brush pen to use? Let us know why in the comments!!