I scooted off early from work the other day… Wednesday I think? And went shopping in Orchard road. Mainly for the sake of visiting Overjoyed… And well I also dropped in on Tokyu Hands, Donki, and several places along the way.
Tokyu Hands! Ahhh I do miss that shop. I wish the one at Westgate was still around… We need a new outlet in the west, open one please! I was pleasantly surprised to see them selling both the Sailor and the Pilot dip pens. It’s the first time seeing the Pilot dip pens sold in stores here for me. Not that they weren’t sold here until now, don’t get me wrong, but I just haven’t been shopping in ages. It’s been a long time since I last visited Think or Fook Hing…. Because work has just been quite crazy. The good thing is that I haven’t been that crazy in terms of buying FP stuff, because neither of those two shops sells stuff online. I still did make some online purchases from OVJ and cityluxe though… :X And I did buy A LOT of art supplies… Like all my miniature painting stuff recently. Lots of acrylic paints for miniatures, and lots of teeny tiny brushes. The space constraints are getting ever more severe… Opps.
The ‘I work on computers’ sticker is absolutely adorable. But alas, the quality didn’t feel that good, like I wasn’t sure if it could take a beating… So I ended up not getting it. I was looking around to see if there were any nice B-side label stickers but the ones they had in stock were pretty generic. I did buy a colorful merlion one though. Might stick it on my luggage bag for the trip…?
Also got taken in by the Uni Emott pencils and bought two sets. Ended up ordering the last set on Amazon (free shipping whee) to complete the collection. I’ve given them a whirl… They are ok. Nice, smooth barrel, very light… But might be a bit slippery. Not like the most ‘high class’ of mechanical pencils, but they function alright. It comes with a stand too so that’s pretty neat, if you want to display it on your desk and all. The lead itself is on the harder side, and the colors seems to be a little light. Still, I thought it might be fun to sketch and doodle with those… I’m treating it more like erasable color pencils maybe? I don’t know. But overall they are very pretty. Not the cheapest, but very pretty stuff.
Overjoyed! What can I say? I’m finally here. And seeing all the products in person rather than online. The last time I went there has to be in Nov last year, when twoset did their 4mil subscriber concert. I got tickets for the rehearsal and went shopping in Orchard road afterwards, before ending up at Cathay to do a quick shop at Ovj… As well as switching out the ‘liquid pencil’ supply on a drawing box I got online, only to find out that it’s really more like a paste than ‘liquid’. Yeah. They have since moved to Cineleisure and I finally visited their new shopping last week. It’s nice to see Mathu there, but she was so busy she only got LUNCH at like… 7pm. Didn’t realise/remember it till much later, but the Taiwan night market food street thing just had their soft launch, so I guess that brought a ton of ppl to their shop too. She asked if I was there for that – nope, I was there solely for Ovj. The entire shop was pretty big, but still I think it’s smaller than the Cathay outlet. It had more of an industrial and less polished feel, more reminiscent of their Rocher outlet. I was delighted to see all the Holbien paints and just couldn’t resist picking up a bunch of Holbien watercolor tubes. I ordered a bunch of their arcyla gouache previously, but have not tried them yet! Mira Byler likes them a lot and I was tempted by her! Also delightful to me was to see all the open stock color pencils. Well previously I already saw they had Holbien open stock… And I did buy myself a set, plus some open stock in my latest online buying spree… But I have yet to test those lol. And ahhh the irojiten color pencils! I saw someone posting about those sets on the Sarah Renae Clark’s facebook group, and my interest was pipped. There are sets available on the Ovj website, but I didn’t see them in person in the shop… So I picked out some pretty pastel colors as open stock instead… I did spend less money then I would have if I’d gotten a set, so I felt that I made the right choice. They have other colors that are more vibrant, but they seem to do a lot more pastel colors so… I thought I’d go with it, and can use them for more cute doodles with no shading.
I did like that the barcode stickers on the irojiten were the high quality, metallic foil stickers, so I had no trouble peeling them off, unlike cheap and aged paper stickers. I still had a few pencils that had sticky residue that needed cleaning off though. But at least I didn’t have to dig my fingernails into sticky paper stickers, trying to get every last bit of paper off. And it’s not because I’m that OCD about this… But rather, the additional thickness of the sticker makes it too thick to fit into my automated pencil sharpener. And in the case of these metal foil stickers… I’m not sure if the sharpener will handle it well at all.
Took a photo of the back of the Emott pencils, where the numbers and colors are listed… I bought refills as well and that’s for the purpose of identifying the refill lead. It just comes in a box of 8 leads, all mixed in a tube… And it’s kinda hard to identify which pencil is for which lead box… Especially since some of the colors (like the two reds) are rather similar. I’m debating whether to just load up the leads into the pencil… But it will jiggle and be noisy in the pencil so… Maybe not.
Also got the Koh-i-noor calligraphy pens. They are cheap, something like just $4.50, and there’s 4 sizes. The lines are nice a crisps, and makes me want to pick up black lettering again.
Ahh the pencils and color pencils. The Emott is less soft than I’d expected… So the leads won’t run out too fast. It’s also a thicker 0.9 width size, so the run out of the mill 0.5 and 0.7 mechanical pencils won’t work with this lead – if you’re thinking of just getting the lead refills. This makes me want to try out othered pencil leads though, and I swear I have some hidden somewhere in my stash. Cheap ones from Aliexpress. I think pilot also has made some colored leads? I do like having the whole range of colors all ‘inked up’ (borrowing some fountain pen terminology!) though, and the design of the Emott pencils are nice and clean. I did also grab a set of 4 (? The small set) Emott fine liners. They have huge sets, like 50 fine liners and stuff. I was tempted, but I really don’t use fine liners *that* often so. I held myself back successfully. Phew.
As for the irojiten pencils. I don’t know what type they are – wax or oil based. Didn’t read up about them. But they aren’t as soft as prismacolors, and don’t seem to blend as well. Not as hard as the polychromos though… Like an in between. Haven’t actually properly done anything with them though, so I won’t venture to say more. The core is definitely way stronger than the prismacolors, or even the faber castell black editions. I can sharpen them to a much longer point and use them without the point breaking. They are nice and smooth too.
Finally… Did another little drawing with my pentel arts fluorescent oil pastels. My comfort go to drawing of a scientist in a lab coat… Only that it’s a lot less detailed than my usual drawings. This would be the first time I’m drawing that colored in actually. I think? Usually I just do it as an outline/sketch. I actually draw it in the farewell gift book that we will be giving to the PhD student in our lab… It’s a useful thing to know how to draw lol!
Alright. That’s all for now… Till the next one I guess?