Meet Your Maker: Bob Dupras, CORRL Creations

(Caroline Foty's first fountain pen was a 1970s Sheaffer No Nonsense that still writes perfectly. Since she discovered pens by independent makers, she wants "one of each, please" and wants to meet all the makers. Maybe you do, too. She lives in Baltimore with pens, cats, and all kinds of fiber arts supplies.)

Before Barry Manilow broke out as a solo artist in the 1970s, a lot of people knew his work without knowing they knew it, because of all the advertising jingles he’d sung, written, or both (“I am stuck on BandAids….” “Like a good neighbor State Farm is there…” “You deserve a break today…”). So one might be tempted to call Bob Dupras the Barry Manilow of custom fountain pens – if you have a collection of pens from independent makers, you probably have examples of his work, but he doesn’t make pens. Dupras does not dislike the analogy. “Plus I’ve actually seen a Barry Manilow concert!”

Following a career in information technology, Dupras’s first choice hobby was to continue his longtime interest in scuba diving, but ultimately back surgery put an end to that, and he turned to woodworking, having enjoyed learning to use a lathe in high school shop class. Kit pens entered his repertoire in 2011, and he found the forums of the International Association of Pen Turners, where he saw resin blanks for sale. He bought some, and soon wanted to make his own to “feed the hobby.” Through the pen turners forums he found Jonathon Brooks of Carolina Pen Company, and asked him for some guidance just to get started. At the time Brooks was using polyester resin, so that’s where Dupras also started. “He coached me on the phone over a month or so. I never met him in person until I went to the DC show two years ago.” Now they both work exclusively in alumilite resin.

Shawn Newton, who’s also located in Arkansas, began using Dupras’s blanks, and pretty soon he said, “Put your blanks on Instagram. Everyone is asking about them.” “I had no idea the pen community is what it is, I wasn’t on Instagram.” He will still make a pen now and then – “I mostly make click pens with Schmidt mechanisms, that’s what I like to use myself” – but like most pen makers who turn to making blanks, the blanks have taken over. “I’m not as busy as Jonathon, I don’t do large orders, but I’m busy making blanks.”

That’s not to say that Dupras hasn’t done collaborations, just not ones that require hundreds of pieces. He’s done batches for Lucky Star Pens, River City Pens, and some other independent makers, as well as Leonardo and Galen Leather.

Inspiration for new materials will often come from collaborator requests, like the NASA photograph of Mercury that led to a collaboration pen with Lucky Star, as well as ocean and water themes. But a new source of inspiration is provided by his five grandchildren, whose initials formed the name he chose for his company: CORRL Creations. “There’s only one vowel so I didn’t have a lot of options! CORRL sounds like coral which called back to my love of scuba diving.” One granddaughter in particular is interested in blank making and has designed some blanks that are selling well and have been made into pens by various makers. “She will probably want to make a pen soon.” Blanks from the kids are all named after them; I got a peek at one called Ryan’s Summer that looked like colors of sherbet.

Dupras has taken his pen skills into a rewarding volunteer relationship with the local Veterans Administration hospital and VA Home. They were looking for things to keep people busy, or provide social and occupational therapy, both to residents of the home, who tend to be older, and to injured veterans temporarily hospitalized. They now have eight lathes, including two for people who have lost a lot of hand mobility, and a complement of twenty volunteers. “That’s the rewarding part – they are like little kids opening a present at Christmas when they make their first pen.” The volunteers organize a booth at the Arkansas Pen Show selling some pens and taking donations for the project at the home and hospital. This spring, Dupras chatted up other independent makers present at the show and ended up getting donated pens from several, including Darailpenz, Newton Pens, Country Made Pens, Magnolia Pens, Hinze Pens, and Dave Dollar Pens, to give away via drawing to people who had donated more than $25; they raised $2000 for the program.

Six other VA hospitals have come to see the project and ordered lathes to get something similar started, and then COVID locked everything down, so it’s unknown how they have gotten on.

Despite favoring “click pens,” Dupras is not without fountain pens. He was so impressed with the Dragonfly pen designed by Renée Meeks at Scriptorium Pens, with blanks made he made specially for her, that he went out of his way to be sure he got one.

Leonardo also gave him one of the pens they made from a run of his blanks called Alien Moon. “I belong to the pen group in Little Rock, but I don’t have as many pens as most pen people.”

New directions for Dupras might include metal working. “I’m toying with getting an engraver to engrave nibs, finials, clips. I bought a metal lathe.” Starting to work with metal got slowed down a little by the tornados that swept through Little Rock in 2023. “My shop wasn’t damaged, but I couldn’t get into it for three weeks because of fallen trees blocking the steps down to it.” However, there was a silver lining. “I can confirm that blanks can stay in a mold for three weeks and you can still get them out.”

Dupras has always found help from other makers when he needed it. “Anybody I’ve asked has been very helpful.” He’s paid it forward as best he can by helping other makers get started, like Tim Crowe of Turnt Pen Company who’s become a prolific maker of blanks. His bottom line advice is, “It costs more to get into this than you think!” and he shares a bit of wisdom he picked up from Jonathon Brooks: “If you get anything usable out of the first gallon of (resin), it’s a win.”

Bob Dupras’s work can be seen on occasional posts on his Instagram @corrl_creations as well as in the work of many pen makers. Newton Pens in particular has a page of photos of available pens in his resins, and calls out the maker of the resin on many photos of pens throughout the site. (If you see a pen you like, ask the maker where the resin came from! They’re happy to tell you and it’s just a fun thing to know!)

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Meet Your Maker: Alan Shrebtienko, On A Whim Woodworks

(Caroline Foty's first fountain pen was a 1970s Sheaffer No Nonsense that still writes perfectly. Since she discovered pens by independent makers, she wants "one of each, please" and wants to meet all the makers. Maybe you do, too. She lives in Baltimore with pens, cats, and all kinds of fiber arts supplies.)

Alan Shrebtienko started making pens “100% as therapy.” A high school physics teacher, and a longtime woodworker specializing in bowls, his life changed when he became so ill he spent more than five months in the hospital and emerged with much of his vision gone. “I couldn’t see well enough to return to teaching. It was my second career (after being a commercial construction superintendent,) and I absolutely loved it, and my students were really successful in their AP exams. I had more toys in my classroom than any kindergarten classroom in the state!”

Making a lot of bowls was a little too difficult given his new normal. “Pens were easier to see than bowls, and it seemed to be something people were buying.” After two years making component pens, he switched to making kitless pens, at about the time that everyone was locked down at home with time on their hands. Some of his segmented wooden bowls are still on display in galleries in the Louisville area, where he lives, but these days his shop is all about pens.

Shrebtienko’s long years of experience with wood turning have served him well in building his pen business. “I needed to develop a process that is repeatable and doesn’t require vision. I was determined to get it done, and kept doing it till I got it right. When you have a pen on the lathe it’s spinning so fast it looks stationary. Once I make the initial contact it’s pretty easy from there.” He approached photographing and shipping pens in the same way. “The setup for taking pictures doesn’t need touching, it’s the same every time. It took me almost as long to package my first pen for shipping as it did to make it. It’s all about consistency.”

Early efforts at making blanks didn’t lead anywhere productive. “The main thing I was making was a mess.” Instead, he sends photos to blank makers like Tim Crowe – the materials called “The Scream” and “Midnight Borealis” were inspired by his photos. “The guys who do this are like magicians.”

The need to establish a consistent repeatable process is somewhat at odds with Shrebtienko’s desire to learn new things and add personal touches to his pens. He has made one basic silhouette, the ‘Zephyr’, with a slight taper and flat ends, for a long time. “I should get an award for the most redundant maker.” But a surprising feature that has crept into his work is a variety of ink windows. “I started them because someone asked me to. I went through several iterations to get them down, and I can make them in any configuration – wide, narrow, multiples.” The process he developed required that he make his own molds, and involves cutting windows in an existing blank, then re-pouring around the blank and boring out the center to open the window to the inside.

Uniqueness is the main reason that his favorite pen right now is one made by Mad Science Pen Co. for the As The Pen Turns podcast Secret Santa exchange. “I can’t write with anything but a fountain pen anymore.”

When he’s not in the shop, Shrebtienko is deeply involved in the blind and vision-impaired community in his area. He lives near the Kentucky School for the Blind and the American Printing House for the Blind, and is working on a National Federation of the Blind audible Easter egg hunt at the School, with eggs that make a sound. Sighted kids can attend as well, but they participate blindfolded. “For most of these blind kids it will be the first time they’ve been able to participate in the egg hunt with their sighted siblings and friends.” When makers were creating pens in blue and yellow as a sign of support for Ukraine, he made a pen specifically to raise donations to an organization for blind Ukrainians.

The biggest new direction for Shrebtienko is metal work. “I like a clip myself, my desk isn’t level. But I’m not putting a $2 factory made clip on one of my pens.” He took a metalworking class and wants to design his own clips and roll stops, as well as finial coins (“I might need a logo…”). In the meantime, he recently developed a new pocket pen version of the Zephyr model. “It caps and posts using the same triple start threads and can be eyedropper filled or it will also use a standard cartridge. My prototypes kept coming apart when I was uncapping them, so I ended up putting reverse threads on the section and that keeps it all together really nicely. I’ve softened the edge around the cap so it easily slides in and out pocket or purse easily without snagging.”

Despite the focused effort required to develop his processes, fun is important to Shrebtienko and is reflected in the name of his business. “I’ve always been about whimsical bright fun.” He marvels at the extent to which the pen community has embraced his work.

“I’m not sure that I have expressed properly how much being part of the fountain pen community has done for me personally. I was having a pretty rough time when I had to leave teaching. I went from the classroom to sitting in my little dungeon. When I started making pens and putting them on Instagram, I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but people started buying them. I was in shock, I couldn’t believe people actually liked my pens and were buying my pens! I was really in awe. This led me to make a whole new circle of friends - pen collectors, and makers, and writers, and just a whole list of neat people. It basically let me get out of my shop without actually leaving my shop. Being a part of the whole fountain pen world has really turned my dungeon into a functional workshop, and it’s allowed me to tell my story from the point of the victor and not the victim.”

Alan Shrebtienko’s work can be seen on Instagram @onawhim_woodworks and on his online shop.

Meet Your Maker: Rob Sanchez, Rob’s Penworks

(Caroline Foty's first fountain pen was a 1970s Sheaffer No Nonsense that still writes perfectly. Since she discovered pens by independent makers, she wants "one of each, please" and wants to meet all the makers. Maybe you do, too. She lives in Baltimore with pens, cats, and all kinds of fiber arts supplies.)

Rob Sanchez was done with his PhD in something to do with robotic exoskeletons, had a job at a biomedical company, and needed a hobby. Having taken a machine shop class in grad school he thought of tools, and bought a router. “That went nowhere - NOT my thing!” A friend was going to the local Rockler, and tossed him the catalogue to see if he needed anything; a component pen kit caught his eye and he said, “Oh bring me this pen kit, this looks cool.” To his surprise, it was just parts, and his friend explained you had to MAKE the rest of it on a lathe. Luckily, his neighbor was a former shop teacher and had all the equipment, so on Memorial Day weekend of 2015 he went next door to learn what to do with a wood lathe, and by the end of the day he was hooked. Within a month he’d bought a Jet wood lathe and a copy of The Pen Turner’s Bible, and wanted to make a red and black pen like a Cumberland ebonite pen pictured therein. Three months later he made his first kitless fountain pen, black ebonite with a Harry Potter theme using parts from a set of earrings.

Fountain pens didn’t figure prominently in what he did for a few years. “I made seven fountain pens in the first five years.” He became known around work as “the guy who makes pens” and co-workers would ask him for special pens for their special occasions. Inspired by the practical needs of his engineering colleagues, he began making X-ACTO knives. “They were running around from their cubes to the lab with X-ACTOs, and the caps pop off.” He made three-piece X-ACTO blade holders that look and operate like a pen, with a cap that screws on over the blade, and gave them as holiday presents to his colleagues. They understandably became quite popular. “That's where I got a lot of my practice on doing sections, doing bodies and caps and finials.” He makes them so that the blade-holding section can be removed and replaced with a fountain pen section.

After a few years, Sanchez ran across the work of John Mikulski of Midwest Hybrids, who made a lot of exotic blanks including not only real wood but also “faux-burl,” the result of a process in which a silicone mold is made from a natural wood burl so that you get the same kind of surface texture in a resin blank. Sanchez bought a number of blanks from Midwest, and ultimately made an X-ACTO knife for Mikulski out of one of his blanks. When Mikulski was approached by a client who wanted a fountain pen made out of a particular hybrid blank, he said, “I don’t really make pens, but I have a buddy…” and “all of a sudden, I became the glitter pen guy.” “I would constantly be on the phone with Midwest and I'm like, OK. I need this much burl and I need this color, and John finally said, “I'm going teach you how to do all of this so that you can do whatever you need on the fly for your clients.” He taught me how to make the silicone molds. He taught me how to cast glitter. And then he said, ‘Now remember, this is just the starting place, you are going to learn and morph this process to adapt to what you're trying to do.’”

Social media played a big role in this leap into glitter. “I was on Facebook for the most part, until a buddy said, ‘Hey you’ve got to move over to this thing called Instagram. That’s where everybody is at.’ And it’s been a nonstop train ride. I didn’t realize there was this massive community on social media. I discovered that there's pen clubs and there's online user groups and that kind of sucked me into the larger pen community.”

That pen community has embraced glitter pens with gusto. Working with blanks full of glitter is more time-consuming than using rods without glitter – you have to keep lathe speeds down so the blanks don’t explode - and as you turn down the glitter-filled resin, a piece can pop out and leave a flaw in the surface; this can also happen during sanding and polishing, requiring more time to refill the surface and begin again.

Sanchez has become part of a small group of makers who focus on using glitter – the Sparkle Siblings, the pen Glitterati, if you will - and they speak to one another constantly. He and Mikayla Jackson of White Bear Pens currently have the same lathe, which is not that common a choice among makers. When his lathe had some initial problems, Sanchez essentially wrote a manual for the maintenance and repair of it, and shared it with Jackson. Ultimately, they discovered a shared love of “all things sparkly,” and Sanchez shared a table with her at the 2024 San Francisco pen show (with plans to do the same in 2025). The other core Glitterati member is Luke Wiechman from Papa J Woodworks, who consulted Sanchez about the care needed in working with blanks with inclusions and in turn helped him improve his social media presence. “Luke and I discuss florals and glitter for literally hours. Two big dudes having a serious conversation about which shade of pink works well with gold.”

A successful business needs a logo, and Sanchez didn’t think long before choosing an octopus as his mascot. “In my mind, the octopus is the engineer of the sea. They’ll use things that they find as tools to do something with, to camouflage themselves, to get into things. There’s a set of gears in the forehead of my logo to represent the engineering side of this.” Polymer clay artist Toni Street creates the octopus finials he uses in all his pens.

Besides pens and X-ACTO knives, Sanchez also makes bottle stoppers and shaving brushes, and his semi-famous mechanical pencils to provide a pretty outside for Pentel innards. He works almost entirely on commission for all his products, and is booked out about a year. This makes it difficult to accumulate enough inventory to consider doing pen shows. However, he is compensated by the personal relationships that develop during the commission process, which are his favorite thing about what he does. “It's not just fill out this form, send it over and you'll hear from me when the pen’s made; it's, Here's the images of what we could start with, what resonates with you? What's your colors? What do you like? What do you dislike? And then over the time that your pen's being made, I'm sending you photos of, Here's the casting. Here's the casting turned into blocks. The blocks being turned. And every time I do that, there's a conversation along with how the day is going, what you're up to, things of that nature, just organically. There's a lot of people who started off as clients where I don't care if they never order a pen again, but we talk all the time. The last time they ordered a pen, it might have been four years ago and I don't care. It's more about the genuine interest in pens and inks.”

His genuine interest leads to him having a different favorite pen every week. At the moment, his favorite is a “steampunk octopus” pen he just received from Stanford Pen Studio. As far as nibs go, he’s an architect guy. There will soon be a new favorite pen, though, as he is working through the commission process with Urushi Notes.

You can’t talk to two dozen pen makers over the course of two years without hearing multiple times about how Sanchez has helped them engineer a solution to a problem. Besides being a glitter consultant, his engineering and CAD experience led him to design a nib-slitting apparatus for Tim Cullen of Hooligan Georgia, as well as molds for casting motifs in resin for Tailored Pen Company. The process works both ways, as Cullen is now mentoring him in engraving and inspired him to take an engraving class.

Sanchez finds fulfillment in working with a wide variety of people even if they aren’t necessarily working with each other so well. “I was an inner city kid, born and raised in East L.A. The kid next to me in class pulled out a gun and I talked him into putting it away. My nickname in that crowd was ‘Peacekeeper.’ That’s the world I came from and it was not full of kindness. I’m trying to put as much kindness back into the world as I can. You’ve just got to be better, do better work and be the bar that everybody’s trying to beat. You have to be the change you wish to see in the world. Be kind.”

Rob Sanchez’s work can be seen on his Instagram @robspenworks and at the San Francisco Pen Show.