Went out to Shivajinagar early this morning to catch the light on a row of old houses near the market, the kind with the wooden balconies and the faded blue shutters. Set up my stool on the footpath, chai in one hand, book in the other. Drew for about ninety minutes and did not notice that I was pressing hard with my 0.3 fineliner. By the time I packed up, the nib was flat. Completely flat, like a chisel gone wrong. I know it is a two hundred rupee pen and I can buy another one on the way home. But this one had drawn maybe forty buildings. It had a slight bend I had learned to work with, a little skip on the upstrokes that honestly gave the ink work some character. You build a relationship with a nib and then you murder it by being greedy with the pressure. So now I am rationing it. Using it only for the final architectural lines, letting the 0.5 do the foliage and the loose stuff. Which is the correct practice anyway, and which I will abandon the moment I am in a hurry again. Anyone else keep a dead tool long past its use? Or is it just me and my sentimentality about stationery.
