hi, i'm cher kaufmann. i am internationalartist and author of the artful mandala coloring book and the ancient alchemycoloring, and today i'm going to give you some tips on gel pens. [gentle guitar music] okay so today, i'm going to talk about gelpens and some tips to use them with coloring books, but you can use these forany activity that you're going to be doing that's craft related. so, i have acouple of different brands, and i'm not going to necessarily do a review on thebrands, but i am going to show you that gel pens vary on how they work, how theylook, and how you can use them.
so, what i have here - the blue one here -is a tecwriter gel, and this is part of a set of 100 pens right now that a lotof people have been purchasing. the green one here is from the write dudes, andthis is one that i got an office supply store, and this one is the sakura moonlight gel pens - these are often at art supply stores, used on black paper -and the last one i have is one that's actually from an office supply storethat we often use just for our handwriting purposes, one that we mightuse for our regular day-to-day life, but i just want to show you that there aregel pens out there, and so even if you don't have something fancy,
you'll have limited color supply, but youcan work with some stronger-looking gel pens, and so this is a pilot - this is just a pilot g2 gel pen. so, first here what we have is the tecwriter gel, and i've already scribbled down a little bit of what this lookslike. this one happens to be kind of glittery. i just want to show you howeasily they glide, and i also want to show you how easily they smear. so, one of the things when you're workingwith the gel pen is: this is a brand new tool. this is not like a colored pencil. thisis not like a marker. this is a very wet
application, and it's very easy to smear,so when people are using this for coloring purposes or for art design, theyhave to be very careful about where they put their hand in application to wherethey have just drawn, so just to show you how these other ones here move... you'll start to see a little colorvariation from the green and blue i just did on that pink... and the pilot onehere. so, you'll notice that they are all very easily smeared. well, here's the cool thing. what we'regoing to do is we're going to use this to our advantage today, and we're goingto learn how to use blending with gel pen.
so i'm going to switch over to one of mycoloring pages from the artful mandala coloring book and what i have done hereis i have used a glittery - it's a real sparkly pink color. this one is from thetecwriter and what you'll notice is if i do a little bit of a shift in thelight, you might notice that there's a little bit of a sparkle and that'sthe desired look from the gel pen when they're straight application. dependingon the paper that you're using, some coloring books do not have very thickpaper; some of them are very thin, and it will bleed through the back. this paper here is actually a prettygood quality paper, and you can see an
impression of the ink, but it's notreally going through to the back, and so that's kind of a good sign of how i wantto work with this, but the artful mandala has single sided pages so i'm not goingto lose any coloring on my coloring pages. so what i've done is: i have just used mygel pen, and i colored every other one with this glittery pencil - i mean pen. but what i want to show you is how touse gel pen in application with other colors, and how to work with it in a waythat will work for thinner papers and also for blending, so the tools that i'mgoing to use are - i have used a, this is called a mulberry prismacolorpencil, and i have colored every other
one from the - this one's glittery, this one's glittery, this was glittery,this one's glittery, so those are gel pen and those ones that were in the middle, in between, i used pencil, and i justcolored those. so, these two here, i've used colored pencil and i'veused my orange on the top and just a little bit of yellow right in thecorners here to create a little bit of a highlight, and a little bit of blending ofthe orange and the yellow in the top pedal, and this one is just a straight mulberry. now here's where the fun begins.
i've got two additional tools i'm goingto show you. one of them is - i have a very thin plastic plate with just a littlebit of water down at the bottom and i have a straight, thin, bristle brush. this is not one of the brushes that havea - let me show you the difference. these are two very different brushes.this one has the pointed tip. this is not the kind that i'm using. i want one thathas a little bit of soft give, but i really want it to be more of a firmerbrush, and i'm going to use a paper towel on the side here. so what i do when i'm using my - there's a wet and a dry way to use the gel pen.
i'm going to show you both ways. with adry brush, what i'll do is simply take a little bitof this coloring down at the end and just pull it while it's wet up into mypencil, and it will create a little bit of a blending, and i'll do the same thingat the top here where i've got a little bit of gel. i'm going to take a dry brush, and i'mgoing to get into pull that down into my pencil, and it creates a blended effect. the wet application is - i'm going toclean that off just a little bit for you. i'm going to do the same thing. i'm goingto apply the gel at the bottom here, and
i am going to take my brush and i'mgoing to put it just at what i call the shoreline of the water - in other words,i'm not going to have it go swimming and dunk it into the water; it's more likethe shoreline. i'm going to just get rid of any extrawater, and i'm going to blot out the extra, so i really want to damp brush, nota wet brush, and then i'm going to do the same thing were i just take the tip of mydamp brush, and i'm going to move the gel pen into my pencil. and the effect isthat it softens and fills any white that was left in the paper from the pencilthat didn't fill in - it's going to fill that in, and i'm going to do the samething here - i'm going to add some of the
gel, and i can get a little bit of waterat the shoreline, get rid of extra, blot that out, and then i can begin to blendthis in, and i can take this as far as i want into the pencil... and what's nice isthat because the pencil is done first, it protects the paper from theabsorption of the wet medium of the gel pen. so if i flip this over you're not going toreally see the gel that i put on those petals. you're going to see where i used the gelall by itself from those tiny little ones before, but the pencil is actually ahuge, little trick when you're using gel
is that it allows it to glide on the topof that wax from the pencil, and you can get a real nice blended effect. it almostcreates like a watercolor wash because you can bring that down. now i do caution: don't use a lot of water because thenyou're going to saturate your paper and that's going to begin to break up yourpaper; you're going to end up with little balls of paper because this isn't - most coloringbooks are not designed to take wet mediums, which is why when you're using a gel pen, you often times will find littleindentations in the paper where it has
been pushed into the paper or soaked in,and if you're going to be using any kind of wet application with a brush, you want to make sure that it is dampand not wet. so, let's show you another example. okay now, this was kind of a little bit ofa crazy example. i'm using this one. i used in a class that i was teaching aprivate class with, that sometimes designs have spaces that are so tinythat you can't really color in every single little place, and if you have alike a fine tip marker or you want to use your gel pens, that'sfine, you can get into those tiny spaces,
but often what happens is that if peoplecannot concentrate on the small places, then you can do, say, bands of color - andthis is just colored pencil. but here's what's cool is that you can see theselittle pink dots that are in here. this is using the application of puttingthis gel pen randomly placed in different places in the paper and thenusing the wet application where i just take the brush at theshoreline, blot out the extra water on a paper towel, and then i just kind ofbegin to move this around. it's going to give it - it's going to giveit a watercolor effect. it's going to change the image just a little bit, andif you're using a glitter type gel pen,
it will begin to create some sparkle indifferent places. so just out of curiosity , i'm going tograb one of these blue ones just to see what does that look like, what does it doif i add blue into some random places - just so you can see what it looks liketo do... gel pen. let's get rid of some of thepink on the brush here. okay... let's see if that's dark enough. now i'm using this example for coloring -not that i think it's the best coloring page in the world, but it's a goodexample to play with when i feel like
there's so much color saturation, and iwant to create something of interest and i'm actually really curious to see what anorange would look like on this. i'm going to add some orange, and i'm going toactually do a little bit bigger, kind of random, because my ideas that i do wantto go ahead and blend this out, it doesn't have to be exact. so, this here is just to show you ways toexperiment. it doesn't have to be where the gel pen stays within the lines. it canactually go right on top of large areas and be spread around just to add a touch ofcolor to create excitement, or interest, or to bring your eye to something thatmaybe you didn't notice before.
okay so here is an example where i alsoused a pencil - let me move this here a little bit - colored pencil, and in this case i wasusing prismacolor pencils, and i was showing a a private class how thedifferences between gel pen by themselves will work and i'll show you aclose up here of what this looks like right here. in this area, that is wheregel pen was used and a wet brush, and it began to ball up the paper, and what i'llshow you on the back here is that when the gel pen was applied and the wet - thedamp - brush was applied you can see where it began to saturate the paper, andthere's another example that i was
giving the class there. but when i havepencil that is applied first, the wax creates that barrier and then the gelpen can glide on top of that. so i have a couple of areas here that i have notdone the gel pen on, so i thought i would show you how i would do the gel pen forthis area. okay, now, with gel pen, it is usually advise thatyou start with the light area first and you pull that area into the dark. that way you're not saturating the darkgel pen into the light areas, so i'm going to be doing this area right here,and i'm going to apply some yellow gel,
and the yellow gel is really going to bekind of hard for you to see, but you'll notice it as we begin to move to theother the other... colors. okay, now i'm just going to clean thisbrush out because i want to get a clean, clean application when i begin to showyou the green, so now i'm going to do the green right here, along the edge, on bothsides. i'm going to dip my brush in just atthe shoreline, get rid of the extra water, blot it out on a paper towel, and theni'm going to begin to pull it from the edge towards the center.
and you'll notice that it has almost like a watercolor effect and begins to fill inthe white of the paper, and i don't want to go over too much because i don't wantto saturate it with a whole bunch of water but i do want to pick up some ofthat gel pen and begin to move it. okay, so now, before i leave here - normallythe way i work is i work in a very systematic way, where if i'm going to bedoing yellow and green, i would go to my next place and doyellow and green, and go to my next place into yellow and green, and then come backwith my other colors just so that i can see how this begins to smooth out beforei go to someplace else.
but just to show you in this area here,i'm going to begin with the lightest, so i'm going to do my gel pen on the verytop edge right here. go to the shoreline, add a little water, blot outthe extra, and i'm going to pull that in. and you'll notice it almost has like awatercolor effect; begins to smooth out any changes from the colored pencilsthat didn't get filled in, and i'm going to add a little bit of gel pen down atthe very bottom here. now, this purple one - there's a lot of gel pen that wasreleased from that - so i'm just going to see what it's like to do this without dipping my brush into the water. okay, so you can see here how it begins tochange that space from what this looks
like here. now, if i want to, i can go backat any time and i can add more colored pencil; i can add more gel pen if i wantmore of the gel pen to be seen. what i do suggest, though, is be very careful abouthow many applications of the damp brush that you use. paper is holding up prettywell - again that's from an example from a private class when i did the gel pen byitself and it saturated into the paper - so i'll do this one more time just toshow you, and i'll do just this circle-y part here. so, we'll do the light blue gel, and thisone actually has a little bit of a glitter to it. i'm just taking my brush at theshoreline, dabbing out the extra, blot out the
extra on paper towel, and begin to pullthis down. okay, and now i'm going to do the purple,just to show you that one more time. now i have had some people tell me thatthey get great results without having to do the damp brush, which is fine - which isgreat - if you're getting exactly the results you need, that's fine. i just happen to like thatit pulls a little bit more of the color if i have a little bit of a damp brush.so, again, you can see this is just pencil over here, and this is with the gel penthat's been saturated with just a little bit of a damp brush and pulled into thepencil - and same thing here.
this is all pencil with a little bit ofgel pen that has been pulled towards the center, and it gives it a shadowyeffect that's there. there's gel pen on the green, blue, purple. there's some gel pen in the yellow,pulled up this way, and it just sort of smoothes all of that out. this is light blue pencil with a littlebit of green gel pen that has been pulled towards the center, and here isyellow pencil with orange gel pen that has been pulled towards the center, andgel pen around the edge here and pulled out from the center to create just alittle bit of a shadow effect.
okay, so we'll show you one more examplejust so that you can have an idea of what looks like with a different colorscheme. this is all prismacolor pencils that'sbeen put down. i'm just going to get my pencil - or my brush - ready and i'mgoing to use kind of a hot pink gel pen. what i have here is red, orange, andyellow, and combinations thereof. we'll leave this one with just pencil so thatyou can see what that looks like. i'm going to put gel pen - i'm just going to drawit straight across the edge here. i'm going to go ahead and dip my brushone more time, and i'm going to begin to
pull this towards the center. and if i want to do a little bit of adeeper color - let's see. what if i did...? there's one that's a little bit of abrownish color. so, let's just, out of curiosity, just takethat against this orange here; it's a little bit more of a bronze color, and i'm goingto flip my page around because i want this to be the easiest as possible formy wrist. you want to make it easy for you to workwith. now it's just not as straight of a line.now, i am interested in this
coloring, but i want to add alittle bit more to it - i think i'd like it to be a little bit deeper - so i'mactually going to add a little bit more. i'm going to go a little higher up... just to seewhat this will do - we'll play. okay, so i kind of like that this is verysubtle that - obviously my eye is picking up something is different, but it doesn'tlook like it's a straight line as much. it's beginning to soften; you can tellthe difference from this side to here. so on this side... we'll go ahead and we'll change - we'll dothe opposite colors. i'll do this brown one along the edge here, just so that wecan see: what does it look like if it's
with that pink color? dab the thing, and we can to pull thisgently. and you can begin to see that it softensand fills in some of the white space that was also of the pencil. now, i'm curious - i'm going to flip itover and see on the back. so on the back here, i see a little bit of where that gelline is but because my brush is damp not wet, it's not causing any problems withthe paper because the wax of the pencil is actually protecting the absorption,and so the gel pen can then simply glide on the top.
okay, so here are the four different pensthat i was experimenting with. this is the tecwriter, the write dudesgel pen, and the sakura moonlight pen, and the pilot g2. what i just wantedto show you here is that if i had my pencil down, and i did a dry brush effect,how far it would take it, and if i did a wet brush effect, how far it would takeit; and some of these are pretty subtle - they may not even be able to be pickedup by what you're viewing. but i do want you to experiment with -this is very different than if i just take my pencil down - the gel pen is goingto fill in all these little white spaces. here is an example of where i put gelpen down first on the right hand side of
each one of these blocks, and then i tookcolored pencil and i applied it on top, and i put a strip of a white applicationto see if the gel pen would begin to move and blend. one thing i will mentionhere is that if you decide to use gel pen and cover it up with pencil; in otherwords, you've colored something in and want to add detail with their coloredpencil. if you are using something that you particularly like - the gloss, themetallic or the glittery effect - the wax of your colored pencil will begin tocover that up, so it is advised to do your pencil first and then begin toadd your gel pen on top to add additional detail, and then if you decideto use the brush technique where you can
move gel pen over into your pencil - you'll notice here it kind of fills in someof the white spaces - that your effect of the gel pen, the glitter or the metallic,will still stay intact because it's not being covered up by wax. and here i justwanted to show you an example of what it looks like for shading. so this is two different colored pencils -there's some dark blue and some light blue - and then the tecwriter gel-glitter pen here and how moved it in, and it actually covered into this space andit almost gives it a watercolor effect; it softens that. this is done with twodifferent green
pencils and the green gel pen. this is with orange and red coloredpencils and the sakura moonlight - that was a kind of a neon color. andthen this was that pilot - this is just a regular pilot gel penthat we often use for writing, just to show you that if in a bind and youwanted to play, you could use something even like this.so the designs that i used for examples are from this book: the artful mandalacoloring book. if you're interested in designs that we showed for coloringtoday, i encourage you to check out the book: the artful mandala coloring bookcreative designs for fun and meditation.
thanks for joining me. i'm cher kaufmann;until next time from the drawing desk, may you find morecolor in your day.
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