I’m continuing my adventure with the D1 ballpoint pen refills and ways to use them for drawing and sketching.
Well, this is all very nice, but what if someone would like to try making art with all these fancy ballpoint pen refills without buying an expensive Italian-made pen or spending hours in an office supplies store trying to look for the least-rattly one?
There is one more interesting hack-like solution to this – using a clutch pencil (or a lead holder as these are called in Japan).
Recently, for a completely unrelated reason, I started to use lead holders for my everyday drawing more and more and got very fond of them by trying leads of various brands and finding ones that worked just right for my art style. Somewhere during that research, I discovered that apart from the most popular 2mm lead holders, the Czech Republic’s famous Koh-I-Noor brand also makes much rarer 2.5mm ones! This is very interesting for our purposes because the D1 standard ballpoint refills are around 2.3mm thick, so these lead holders could be ideal ballpoint pens too!
Koh-I-Noor-made art tools are common in Poland, so I asked my parents to send me a few of the pencils in a letter, but ask around – maybe you, too, have a friend living in Prague who can be convinced to go on a walk to the Koh-I-Noor flagship store. A few weeks ago, the letter came in, and I was able to put some ballpoint-pen refill hacked clutch pencils into my everyday sketching set and tested them out.
The results were very promising! Not only it’s effortless and fast to change the refills (just press the button, and the refill falls right out), but also, as these holders were originally developed for technical drawing and professional art making, the clutch mechanism grips the tip of the refill very securely and with no play at all.
I was a bit worried about how resistant the refill would be to being pressed hard onto the paper surface – would it slip and sink into the pen? But I tried to press quite hard, and it would not budge – I would crush the point of a regular pencil lead with the force I had to apply to actually make the refill slip.
Combined with something like the SCHMIDT 635 M or LAMY M21 refill, this tool starts to feel like a true hybrid between a ballpoint pen and a pencil – great for doodling, sketching, and even using with watercolors.
Koh-I-Noor sells two kinds of 2.5mm clutch pencils (with the difference being only in the colors as far as I can tell): the Versatil 5905 and 5205, which can be bought very inexpensively for about 6,50 Euro (7USD) with or without the clip.
Now, as it’s finally getting warm in Japan and the cherry trees are about to start blossoming, I’m looking forward to trying to use these outside, too, for now, I made a sketch from a photo:
Mateusz Urbanowicz 
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