Tombow ABT Dual Brush-Pen, Single markers

These are the individual ABT pens sold on their own rather than in a pre-set palette, covering the full 107-color range. Buying open stock makes sense if you've gone through a single shade faster than the rest of a set, or you're building a custom palette from scratch rather than starting from a fixed selection.

Each pen has the standard ABT dual-tip layout: a flexible nylon brush tip that adjusts from a hairline up to about 10 mm depending on pressure, and a fixed 0.8 mm bullet tip on the other end for detail work. The cap is color-coded to the ink inside and has an anti-roll clip, so a single pen doesn't go rolling off a tilted desk.

This is also one of the most widely used pens in the bullet journal community, largely because the two tips line up with the two different jobs a BuJo spread needs. The fine 0.8 mm tip holds a steady, pressure-independent line, which is what most journalers use for grid lines, habit trackers, checkboxes, and daily task entries. The brush tip handles the decorative side — page headers and titles done in brush lettering, where pressing down on the downstroke and lifting on the upstroke creates the thick-thin contrast of real calligraphy. A common workaround for anyone who hasn't practiced brush control yet is to write the word first with the fine tip, then go back over just the downstrokes with the brush tip to fill them in — a quick way to get a faux-calligraphy look without freehanding the whole word in brush strokes.

Because the ink is water-based and water-reactive, it also gets used a bit like portable watercolor inside a notebook. Touching the tip of a darker pen against a lighter one for several seconds lets some ink transfer between them, so the next few strokes from either pen come out as a blend rather than a flat single color — useful for ombré lettering. Scribbling ink onto a non-porous surface like a plastic palette or sandwich bag, then picking it up with a wet brush, is another common technique for painting a soft background wash behind a spread. And since the ink doesn't bleed through the page the way alcohol-based markers do, it's reasonably safe to layer color or shade doodles in a dot-grid notebook without ruining whatever's on the other side of the sheet.

Specifications

• Brush tip: flexible nylon, up to 10 mm
• Fine tip: 0.8 mm polyester bullet tip, anti-roll clip
• Ink: water-based dye, blendable, water-reactive (not lightfast), minimal bleed-through
• Available individually across 107 colors
• Common uses: bullet journaling (BuJo) grids and trackers, brush lettering and faux calligraphy, tip-to-tip ombré blending, watercolor-style washes