What's this? A product review? Dang right! Today, I'm sharing my experience with the Hethrone dual tip black markers.

I bought these pens to write the thank you cards for the guests who came to our wedding back in April. Since then, I've written about 100 very lengthy thank you letters to our guests using the fine point of these markers. But I also had an ulterior motive. Sometime soon, I want to make my own hand written Bible. Of course, writing all 73 books in the Bible is going to be a massive undertaking, and if I'm going to do it, I want it to be something special I can hand down to the next generation to be cherished. To make it something special worthy of the massive undertaking (not to mention the subject matter), I want to make it really nice. This means I'm going to need to establish certain standards, including the pen and, to the best of my ability, the hand writing.

The handwriting will be a challenge as it is, so I need to find a pen that is super comfortable to work with, extremely consistent, and very durable since I'm very heavy handed in just about everything I do on paper. Due to the enormous size of holy scripture, I'm also going to need a pen that is either expensive and refillable or cheap and disposable. It's worth mentioning that there are hundreds of brands of ballpoint pens out there that are cheap and disposable that write really well. However, because I'm so heavy handed, a ballpoint pen is going to emboss the pages far too much and damage the opposite side; which will also need to carry text. Anyway, the Hethrone dual tip black markers are the first major candidate in the cheap and disposable category.

Hethrone Dual Tip Marker Size and Shape

With the caps on, the Hethrone markers are 6.25" long. The overall shape is tapered so that the thicker end of the pen has the simulated brush pen (not actually a brush, just a flexible brush-shaped soft tip). The opposite, thinner side of the pen has the fine tip marker, which is very similar to the Pigma micron markers. This tapered edge is actually extremely important because after your first time using the pen, your fingers are going to rub off almost all of the white ink indicating which side is which and the brand name of the pen. In general, it was pretty easy to hold and rotate as needed (see below for durability).

It's also worth mentioning that the pen has a very matte finish all over it; which makes it easy to grip without the slippage you might get from a glossy finished surface. This was a plus for me, as writing long letters in cursive require a constant grip on the pen.

Thoughts on the Hethrone pen ink

I have mixed feelings on the ink. Using the fine tip marker, I felt like it was perfectly adequate for writing letters. It put out a steady flow of ink consistently while I wrote about 100 letters in cursive. On some surfaces, similar to a grainy cardstock, the ink seemed to soak into the paper a little too easily and it did fade a bit. However, it was adequate for writing notes and letters. On the brush tip, it was a totally different experience. Although the ink flow was even, the ink absorbed into the paper much too easily and faded almost instantly. The end result was a black brush pen that was even lighter than my cheap black alcohol ink markers. If you use Copics, the dried color of the line was the equivelent of a Neutral Gray N6 or N9 marker (N0 being the lightest and N9 being the darkest).

To put this in perspective, when I normally ink my art with Pigma Micron or Graphic pens, Faber Castell PITT pens, or Pentel brush pens; the ink from these pens is darker than even my black Copics. If you want really deep blacks for your art, the ink in these Hethrone dual tip markers will probably leave you disappointed.

Durability of the Hethrone dual tip pens

We've already established that the white font of the pens comes off super quick. Let's talk about the actual stability of the Hethrone dual tip pen.

I haven't had the time to do a ton of work on the brush side of the pens. And to be honest, if I was going to spend the amount of time on an art piece required to properly test the brush tips on these, I wouldn't use the Hethrone pens because of the poor final ink strength.

On the other end, I have mixed feelings about the fine tips. I've damaged a few of these markers one way or another. I've probably written at too sharp of an angle, pressed too hard one too many times, and put the cap on at a slight angle, causing the nibs to get crushed or malformed. All of this happened under realistic every day use. It wasn't some battery of tests I put the pens through.

When this happens, the pen has a tendency to leave an artifact next to the line I'm intentionally making, and the line I'm intentionally making is much thicker than the others made before the damage. I found that by rotating the pen 90 degrees, I could usually fix the problem if I was too lazy to get a new pen. However, you have to be very careful about the rotation of the pen for the remainder of whatever you're using it for.

This for me was the final nail in the coffin of these pens for their use in the creation of my handwritten Bible. A lot of times, the nibs would be damaged, but the pen would be writing fine. I'd switch hands, stretch my fingers and pop my knuckles, and go back to write only to find the nib was damaged and now leaving artifacts. If that happens at the end of an enormous page of scripture, I'm going to rage quit.

I wrote 100 letters with 4 pens. The three that failed all failed because the nib was damaged, not because the pens ran out of ink or began sputtering.

Ethics

When I consider the ethics of something like a pen, I either mean "What country is it made in?" or "What are the values of the company creating it?". In general, I try to put my dollar where my mouth is.

I did an Amazon search for "German art pens" and these popped up. Impressed by the price, I went ahead and placed an order for a set of a dozen of them. Of course, the things were made in China. Amazon is totally useless when searching for country of origin.

As I've already discussed in other places, China is an increasingly totalitarian communist dictatorship trying to project its power on free peoples all around the world, including right here in the United States. The regime actively invests in weapon systems designed to kill American men and women in combat. They persecute devout Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists, and people of many other faiths unless they can figure out a way to control the faith with the Communist Party. Plus, they're actively using slave labor to prop up their economy and provide cheap products throughout the world to the peril of domestic manufacturing efforts (and quality control efforts) around the globe.

China is an enemy to faith, reason, and freedom and I do not want to support them by buying their products and funding their evil empire any more than absolutely necessary.

So yeah, at the end of the day, I was never going to write a bible using cheapo pens made by a torturous communist regime on the backs of slaves. That just seems extremely un-Christian.

Final verdict on the Communist Supporting Hethrone dual tip black markers

If you need some cheap pens, at $0.84 a pen, this is a decent deal for what you get... especially if you aren't as heavy handed as I am as the nibs will probably last you longer. Just make sure you treat the nibs like you would want your daughter treated by her boyfriend on prom night and don't go trying to play with the nibs. Just keep in mind that while the ink is (barely) black, it's made with the blood of slaves.

If you have a recommendation for a fine art pen that's refillable or cheap that doesn't fund the bloodlust of the Chinese government, please let me know! I'm eager to try it!