Nakaya
Nakaya Portable Cigar Ishime-Kanshitsu Midori
Nakaya Portable Cigar Ishime-Kanshitsu Midori
The Nakaya Portable Cigar Ishime Midori fountain pen features hand-sprinkled urushi powder to create a textured finish. This full-size pen will be a comfortable fit for most users.
With its textured stone-like finish and sleek silver color, the Nakaya Portable Cigar Ishime-Kanshitsu Midori fountain pen achieves greatness by virtue of its streamlined design and flawless surface.
The process of collecting the Urushi (sap) and applying many layers of lacquer to this fountain pen takes three months to complete. The craftsman sows Urushi powder onto the body, which creates a grainy surface. After it has settled, he varnishes the body with lacquer several times to make the body harden. He sharpens these grains with charcoal and finishes with a silver lacquer. It is truly an artistic craftsmanship to decorate a fountain pen with a stone-like finish - ""Ishi"" translates as ""a stone"" in Japanese.
As with all hand-painted Tame-nuri pens, the colors will vary slightly from pen to pen - no two will ever be exactly the same. The Portable Cigar in Ishime-Kanshitsu Midori can be filled with bottled fountain pen ink using the provided converter. Nakaya pens can also use Platinum brand ink cartridges. Hand-painted Maki-e converters are also available.
14k nibs are well-suited to customizations including Stub, Cursive Italic, and Left Oblique, as well as the modification for added flex.
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Customization Guide
Stub
 
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Above is the same size nib after a regrind to Stub. A regrind to Stub is often a good place to start for your first customization. Â A Stub nib provides broad down-strokes and narrow cross-strokes while writing, and is less position-sensitive on the paper than the crisper and slightly more demanding cursive italic.
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Cursive Italic
 
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More demanding, but also providing crisper edges and more line-width variation, is the very popular customization to Cursive Italic. This also provides broad down-strokes and narrow cross-strokes, but is also more position-sensitive in terms of how the pen is held and requires more skill on the part of the user. This is a common customization for artists and calligraphers, but is still smooth enough to make for a good everyday writer.
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Formal Italic
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Formal Italic is an even crisper and more demanding customization than either cursive italic or left oblique, and is usually utilized for calligraphy and by the most experienced users. This provides broad down-strokes and narrow cross-strokes, with even crisper corners and edges than a cursive italic - this is an extremely position-sensitive customization.
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Left Oblique
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 Commonly used for signatures and correspondence, the Left Oblique customization provides broad diagonal strokes and narrow cross-strokes, and like a cursive italic, is more position-sensitive and demanding than a stub. The whole pen must be rotated to the left in order to write smoothly, without skipping. The "Left" in Left Oblique refers to the cut of the nib itself, and does not refer to the handedness of the writer. |
Architect's Point (Also for Arabic and Hebraic writing)
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A more exotic regrind is that to Architect’s Point. Named after the style of writing used by Frank Lloyd Wright, this regrind is the opposite of cursive italic, and provides for broad cross-strokes and narrow down-strokes. This also tends to be a particularly useful customization for those practicing Arabic or Hebraic calligraphy. |
Spencerian
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Perhaps our most popular customization, but also one of the most advanced, the Mottishaw Spencerian Customization has gained special attention from being featured in a customer's YouTube video which has now received over twelve million views! The Spencerian starts from a semi-soft 14k nib and adds additional flex and a regrind to needlepoint to create a specialized writing point used for copperplate calligraphy. For more details, visit our special Spencerian page.. |