The Rotring Isograph is a pretty old school architectural drawing pen. It comes in a bunch of sizes, and it was my tool of choice before any professional work came knocking. I’ve had to dig one of the old pens out, actually, because I’ve been digital so long I’ve had to remove some mothballs on this one.
This is the 1.4mm sized pen. Up until going fully digital in the last decade, this was my tool of choice for drawing panel borders and why, even now, my default panel border width is 1.4mm. I think I’ve owned this pen since the late 80s.
I’ve exploded it out here so you can see its workings. It’s a refillable pen, and you’re better just using rotring ink (which to the best of my memory isn’t waterfast)
I’ve always loved the chunky line it makes and though it requires a little too much cleaning and care (it’s been sat upright for at least a year and unused and needed a bit of a cleaning, though I didn’t do as thorough a job as I could) but once cleaned it’s pretty rock solid.
If you want the 1.4 line you’ve got to hold it at 90° from the paper to guarantee a steady ink flow. On the other hand if you start playing around you can get a nice chunky ink line with some body to it.
Anyway, I’m digging it out because I want to go and use some old school tools. Many of the tools I use have deteriorated (and look, let’s be honest – so have I) in particular by lovely black erasers that where brilliant for erasing and never leaving smears, somehow the chemicals in them, it turns out, are just not that stable and they’ve sort of melted in to many plastic surfaces they’ve been sat near. Very odd.
Anyway, will let you know how it goes.
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