Review time! - Or perhaps I should say 'my thoughts and experiments with...ZIG Art and Graphic Twin Pens'.
Some of you might have noticed a new design logo in my sidebar. I'm totally thrilled to say that for the last couple of months I've been one of the bloggers lucky enough to have been doing some work for Kuretake.
Kuretake have a huge (and I mean HUGE!) range of pens and markers but they also do papercraft products such as paper punches, embossing powders, embellishments and lots more, perfect for us crafters!
I've been putting some of the Kuretake art and craft products through their paces and I thought you might find it helpful if I shared some of my experiments and thoughts on what the products I've tried do.
This week I'm going to start with the ZIG Art and Graphic Twin pens.
The ZIG Art and Graphic Twin pens are twin tipped, as the name suggests, with a brush tip at one end and a 0.8 mm point tip at the other. As far as I know there are 80 colours in the range and ink is water-based, xylene free and odourless. They make perfect pens for many watercolour techniques and stamping techniques, but I shall show you some examples of these later!
I have to show you this next picture, which is from Kuretake themselves, because I think it really shows how gorgeously juicy and wonderfully flexible the brush tips are, yep they really do look like that when you do that - I've tried it!
The brush tips are made from rubber instead of fibre, which for me does make a big difference for this style of pen. Like many of you I've tried a number of watercolour pens in the past and I think they have all been fibre tipped and not very juicy or flexible.
Ok so why is this important to me? Well first off it means that colouring directly onto stamps with the pens is a lot easier, you get really good coverage with the good ink flow and the flexible tip means it really does work like a brush, and I have an example of a make where I've coloured the stamp with the ZIG Art and Graphic pens before stamping.
But that isn't all you can do with these pens, a lot of different techniques are open to you and the more you experiment with them the more you will find! For instance the pens are great for colouring images either directly, as in the example below:
or by using a brush or a ZIG water colour brusH20 as in the next example:
So by now you can tell that I am enamoured of these pens and not just because I am designing for Kuretake, I promise!
Before I go I wanted to share some of my other experiments using these pens, the first I scribbled the ZIG Art and Graphic pens onto my craft mat and spritzed with water then laid the background down on the ink to pick up the colour. The rubber tip makes scribbling on the craft mat very easy.
My next sample shows you the results of a watercolour technique where you add texture by using salt to 'change' the movement of the water on the paper. This time it is the 'juicy-ness' of the tip that makes this a great technique to use with these pens! Notice the mottled effect on her dress below:
I hope that this has whetted your appetite for the ZIG Art and Graphic pens, and if you have them already I hope that you will feel inspired to get them out and experiment with them some more - I would love to see what you have been up to with them!
For more inspiration pop along to the Kuretake Facebook page to see some lovely work that people are doing with the Kuretake products.
Have a lovely Friday you all.
Kim
