Cello Butterflow Ballpoint Pen – Test

The Cello Butterflow ballpoint pen is a strange and wonderful tool. It is inexpensive, very smooth to write and draw with, and it sometimes behaves like a gel pen. Can this self-proclaimed best pen for writing exams also be a good pen for artists and those interested in drawing with the ballpoint pen? Watch the episode for our answer.

Samir: For a whole year now we’ve been seeing how the differences between ball pens and gel pens are starting to disappear and things are beginning to blur. Is Cello Butterflow the perfect example of that middle ground?

Vishal: Hello and welcome to Stationery Test Drive – the show where we take ordinary tools on an artistic spin. I’m Vishal.

Minjal: This is Minjal.

Samir: I’m Samir.

Minjal: And today we’re looking at the Cello Butterflow Ballpoint pens.

Vishal: As Samir said in the intro, the lines are blurring. Cello says that it’s a ballpen but we think it behaves like a gel pen and is that even a distinction anymore?

Samir: I think it is becoming more and more difficult to tell them apart. Having now studied the nib of this one much closer, yes it definitely seems to work more like a ballpen. However, when I was actually working on the test piece I was quite convinced through out the working that this was a gel pen. I did not feel at any point that this was a ballpen.

Vishal: See now, this little balling and smudging when you use it is indicative of a ballpen, or rather it is a by product of the ball point pen.

Samir: It’s actually a by product of the kind of ink because gel pens have balls in the mechanism too.

Vishal: So it’s the ink that sort of accumulates a little and then after a while of doing maybe a thin line, you get that bit of balling and depending on how pedantic you are, sometimes that can be extremely annoying.

It was extremely annoying when we did the Pentel RSVP which we must bring up because we we did not like too much, as handsome as they were to look at. But the Cello Butterflow Simply Ball performs well. I do like it.

But that aside the Cello Company is one of the largest like Indian or worldwide manufacturers of plastic things, right? Everything from buckets to ballpens!

Samir: Yes! Buckets to ballpens is a good way to put it. They started in 1982 as a plastics company. They started making what’s essentially I guess some sort of Tupperware.

Minjal: They started with thermoware which is basically the hot casseroles.

Samir: So they had a good decade of doing that. By 1994, so literally more than 10 years later they got into molded plastic furniture. You know all those cheap chairs that we like to throw around at events. And the very next year they made their first pen using nibs and mechanisms that were imported but just like molding the body of the pen itself. It’s a very interesting journey for a stationery company.

Minjal: Now the Cello writing division claims that they sell over 5 million pens every day.

Samir: That is a lot!

Minjal: In India no particular brand has a monopoly but this would be close.

Vishal: And this is cheap, right? This is one of the best selling pens in India and how much is this?

Minjal: You get a pack of 10 for 100 Indian rupees.

Vishal: So that’s like a dollar and twenty cents? Or a dollar and ten cents?

Samir: For 10 of them.

Vishal: And this is a full cartridge here or refill, whatever you call it in ballpens. I barely used less than a thumbnails worth of it, on a pretty decent drawing and maybe we should get into to our drawings.

Why don’t you go first Minjal since you have most colorful center stage! See now that is just, I don’t know, I almost like to think of it as musical. Why don’t you tell us about this one?

Minjal: I’m not really used to creating art with ballpens. Like majority people out there I use them for writing, so when it comes to creating art pieces I’m always a little confused about what to do. And these pens are so smooth, I was just sat with a ruler and kept drawing lines and I thought that’s what I’ll do for this piece.

And from all the ballpens that we’ve used this one actually doesn’t really smudge that much and wherever it was balling, like Vishal says, ‘it’s not a bug it’s a feature.’ So I actually used it that way, wherever it was balling I’ve made the balls or the dots. And this is really a great ballpen not just for writing but even for art.

Vishal: Yes, I think the ethos of this show is certainly how much you can do with ordinary tools and this is the most ubiquitous, simple thing. If you ever thought, I can’t get into art because it’s too expensive, this is a mass market pen that you can make art with. You can just buy a set of them, you can buy a few hundred sheets of paper for around the same price and you’re good to go in your artistic journey.

Minjal: And also the Butterflow is available in a red, blue and black color. This has a point seven mm tip and the rubber grip called the ‘Elasto’ grip.

Vishal: Which is lovely, you don’t expect it on this type of a pen.

Samir: It actually reminded me a lot of the Paper mate Inkjoy Gel Pen. That had a similar sort of textured grip but I think this one’s a little better, it feels softer. And for something that has a fairly slim profile, it’s surprisingly comfortable to hold.

Vishal: I used mine for well, you know, continuing a tradition here on Test Drive where I try to do comics with pretty much everything. This is mine. It’s all Butterflow, with a bit of an under drawing, of course initially.

But it was so surprising how much you can get out of the same pen. Now, even if I looked at this I would probably, use three different types of gauges of fine liner or something. But, no, this is one very cheap ballpoint pen for everything from as simple as drawing the boxes, to the texture, to the little buildup of patterns and things like that, and the writing.

I did this because I usually do illustrated works, I wanted to try some kind of writing because this is the workhorse of literally 5 million people a day, and most of those people are not artists, they are using it for writing. So I kind of wanted to see what you can get out of it in a sort of artistic writing way.

Minjal: I think one of the other ballpens that we really liked reviewing were the BiC Cristal Up Pens and what we have to also mention is that BiC acquired a 100% stake in Cello in 2015.

Vishal: So the buckets and all or just the pens?

Samir: Just the writing division.

Minjal: It’s not surprising because BiC is a great company and for them to have had trust to acquire 100% stake in a brand and give it their name, because it is now called the BiC Cello Company.

Samir: Right and I’d just like to go into a bit of a personal story. I was not aware of Cello specifically let’s say about a decade ago. I think someone gave me one of these pens, one of these pens exactly, a Butterflow. And that stayed in my pocket because I carry a pen and a little notebook in my pocket.

That one stayed in my pocket for over 5 years and continued to work. The entire body was cracked and what not because it’s in your pocket with you know spare change and keys, but the pen continued to work and this was probably before BiC took over, so I’m guessing Cello was good enough even before BiC took over.

Vishal: I mean they were good enough for BiC to to take over! Why don’t you show us what your Test Drive is and we can round out our set.

Samir: So I went for a completely illustrative piece. And again as I was working on this, I’m trying to look now and I really can’t see any balling on this entire piece, other than maybe a little here, which is why when I was using it I just did not think that it was a ballpen. I very much thought that I was using a blue gel pen and that’s the way I treated it and it worked fine.

Vishal: The variety of line quality you got, little like feathered lines and these nice ‘ligne claire‘ thick ones or even something like this, which you get that impression, at least I do. It’s such a great range for just having something at hand. It’s like the nimble point and shoot cameras that people are getting back into these days because they realize you know what, it’s good enough to make artistic things with.

Samir: Yes and sometimes you want something that you don’t need to take care of too much, something that you don’t need to worry about the inks too much, the refills too much, the cleaning too much. This is as worry free an instrument as you can get.

Minjal: I think we clearly need to look into their portfolio and test a few more products. What we’ll do is test some of their fountain pens as well, they have marker pens and fountain pens.

As much as we like expensive stationery products, what we need to also always keep in mind is that you should definitely try out the stationery products available in your local supermarkets or stationery stores.

Samir: The one thing that we all did was mostly stick to kind of clean, line art. Now that I’ve, late realized, that this is actually a very nice blue ballpen I really should try some properly shaded ballpen portraits with this at some point.

Vishal: I was starting to get there but like you said, yes now I want to push that more, I want to see what the range of it is because that’s one of the fun things about ballpens.

Samir: You can actually do shading with them which you can’t with gel pens.

Vishal: Well, that is the BiC Cello Butterflow Simply Ball – it’s a ballpen, not a gel pen and you know what maybe it’s time that that doesn’t matter anymore. Ballpens were kind of the iPhones of their time.

We’ve talked about this long ago all the way back to our second episode of our first series, there are 53 episodes of that that you can watch. Yeah, the ballpens and then in the’ 70s I think there were gel pens which were like this new thing and then fine liners came around and there are all these wonderful things that are really made so that millions of people literally every day can just use a pen to write things.

But if you are like us, artists, calligraphers designers, people who don’t quite fit into the mold of things that doesn’t mean you can’t just go out and get the most standard, ubiquitous, normal pen out there and you can have a great time with it.

This is going into my repertoire just like some of the other cheap ones that we been using. I loved the line quality, definitely going to use it more for comics, Samir you are definitely going to use it for not just ligne claire drawings like this but shaded ones as well. Minjal, are you getting into abstract musical art and if I run this through some kind of computer parser is it going to give me a message?

Minjal: We’ll just probably just dunk it in the Cello bucket the next time.

Vishal: WOW! So that’s installation art! If you’re new to this show, yes we are sort of multi faceted in our artistic expression but Minjal has great experience in calligraphy and things like that, Samir and I more graphic designer, illustrator, animator, and we will near do well next time, that was a segue. We have other things planned for the week in between, for the weeks in between, stay tuned for those. And until next time, I’m Vishal.

Minjal: This is Minjal.

Samir: I’m Samir. And if you liked this video on a very, very cheap and simple ballpen you really should look at our video on the Paper mate Inkjoy which we mentioned, that was a good one. And another cheap and great ballpen was our 4 – in – 1 Hauser ballpens which we made some really beautiful four color art with. Check those out.

Vishal: When in doubt, SIMPLY BALL!

1. Cello Smooth Butterflow Ballpoint Pen, Regular Use Premium Pen, Pack of 10 – https://amzn.to/4i2H13V
2. Paper Mate InkJoy Fine Point Assorted Gel Pens, 8 Pack – https://amzn.to/4fEujGZ
3. HAUSER 4 In 1 Pens Ballpoint 4 Pc, 1.0 mm Colorful Pens, Blue / Black / Red / Green Pens – https://amzn.to/4eHdASd
4. Bic Cristal Up Ballpoint Pens – Assorted Colors, Pack of 8 – https://amzn.to/4hVtsDH