WATER SOLUBLE PENS 1

Some pens are water soluble.

In our continuing exploration into drawing instruments that are water soluble (see WATER SOLUBLE PENCILS, for example,) how about water soluble pens?

Most felt tip and ball point pens do not advertise themselves as being water soluble.  Some will say that they are water insoluble, and we will look at some of these later.

So to find a water soluble pen that you like, it is a process of trial and error.  We have a bunch of these Pentel Liquid Gel Ink pens in the office.  I guess that’s because pens like these are sold at Office Max, are inexpensive, and are good general all around pens.

And when used to make transparent drawings, their effect is interesting.  I did the above drawing by assembling my transparent forms with just lines.  When you apply a wash, even without any color, the lines dissolve somewhat.  And so the black of the line becomes part of your wash.

As you can see in the above in progress photo, the lines where the wash was applied have indeed dissolved.  The color of the tone that I applied to the drawing was a very light yellow.  Yet this color was darkened considerably by the ink from the dissolving line.

And this works as a transparent drawing.  It does not turn to mud.  The transparency of the forms remains.

Yet there is a subtle flattening to the image.  The process of applying the wash tone somehow segregates the wash by dissolving the lines that you are washing over.  So by putting say a tone on a background plane, the foreground lines that you cross begin to serve as demarcation to the wash.  And this, at least to my eye, flattens the drawing a bit.

Despite this caveat, the effect is nice.  And when you apply a wash over a line that was previously washed, the amount of dissolving is considerably reduced.

So pick up one of these pens, or any pen for that matter, and see what happens.  The worse that can happen is that it turns to mud.  And if that happens you just do another drawing.

Keep drawing.