Writing Wipe Out – Pens and Pencils writing on wet paper

What is going to write best should your paper get wet – Pen or Pencil? Let’s go to the lab and find out. Here are the competitors, who fare well on a dry piece of paper:

We’ve got a nice range here: Rotring Tikky II mechanical pencil, good old wooden pencil, the mijia gel signing pen, the Muji fountain pen, and the Tombow airpress ballpoint pen. The assignment was pretty basic- write the alphabet and a sentence on a damp piece of paper. Here was the result:

Breakdown – let’s look at color, bleed, and skipping.

Pencils: They lost a lot of color. Since graphite essentially rests on top of the paper (therefore, is erasable) the water interferes. Bleed doesn’t happen, skipping either. The Rotring Tikky tore the paper a little, so points off.

Mijia gel Signing Pen: Well, this isn’t a great pen to begin with-dry or wet. It gets points for consistency though, because it wrote similarly (which means it skipped) in wet and dry environs, didn’t bleed, had ok color wet.

Muji Fountain Pen – Wrote great on dry paper, but bled a lot on the wet-maybe leave the Muji at home if it’s raining. Color was the same, didn’t skip.

The Tombow Airpress: The Tombow Airpress did the best out of all of the competitors. Good color on the wet paper, didn’t skip, and didn’t bleed. Maybe because it’s oil based-and oil doesn’t mix with water.

There you have it: grab a ballpoint pen if it’s going to rain.

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