Playing with colour & Uniball Posca pens!

I've wanted to try out Posca pens for absolutely ages - I've heard such great things about them, and I've seen countless comic shop windows adorned with Posca-drawn illustrations, so they've always piqued my interest! So I was thrilled when the lovely team at Uniball were kind enough to send me a whole rainbow's worth of colours and nib types for me to play with and explore creatively (hurray!).

Right, so before this little exploration (or shall we say, scientific creative experiment?), the only thing I really knew about Posca pens were that they're the go-to pen for drawing on glass as they have such a broad range of sizes, opaque finish, and most importantly they're perfect for easily wiping off afterwards. I recently found out about a bit of a disaster a few years ago at a local library, where someone had decided to decorate the library windows a) without permission, and b).....with permanent ink pens....ARGH! So it's safe to say, if you feel the need to get creative on glass make sure you're using the right pens! You'll be glad to know that after a little sketch or two with the Posca pens on my own home windows, they look amazing and clean off perfectly with water and a tiny dash of washing up liquid, phew!

Beyond glass, I was really excited to learn just how many surfaces you can work on with the pens - everything from ceramics, to paper (obviously?), to fabric. I kind of had to restrain myself from bounding about the house doodling on everything like a three year old on a sugar high.  I particularly enjoyed adding a little pizzazz to this flower pot (home to my beloved chilli plant), and I have some big plans for the potential to illustrate my designs onto ceramic jewellery over the next few weeks - I'll keep you updated!

One thing I didn't know before using the pens, was their versatility in terms of working with their opaque quality. Obviously, I'm constantly drawing, but with traditional media I'll admit it would mostly be pen-on-white-paper; but with the Posca pens I'm able to draw on a huge variety of paper colours with a bold, strong line even with the lighter pen colours (and gawd the metallics look good!). It's been incredibly useful for signing my prints as well, especially with all these comic conventions coming up! A gold Posca pen has definitely become a staple for my comic-con artillery for quick signatures on books, prints and live drawings, whatever the background colour.

In my illustration work, I most often use ink brush pens to create my linework; so it was great to try out Uniball's Posca Free Size brush pens. Again, they have that great opaque colour, so it really opened up a lot of opportunities for me to play creatively in ways that ink might not necessarily allow. I did find that on some paper stock, overworking an area sometimes led to a little eating away at the paper texture, so I'd recommend using a good quality paper if you're doing anything more than light sketching. I absolutely loved the broader 1.8-2.5mm bullet nibs for drawing on larger surfaces and block colouring, whilst the 0.7mm bullet nibs were my favourites for sketching and for illustrating faces. The 0.7mm pin type nibs were a little bit fine for my style of illustration, but perfect for writing, or if your usual style is fine linework, more controlled comics art or you want to transition from biro pens.

The range of colours is really impressive; they're all so bold and have a gorgeous chalky quality to them. One look at my portfolio and you'll notice I use a lot of coral and teal in my work (not sorry), so some of the pens wouldn't have been my very first choice of colour for a final illustration, but my oh my do they make me happy to use for sketching and ideas! I'm also really excited to try them out with some of the window illustration projects I have coming up later in the year - those are the kind of times that call for bold colour!

The metallics were really fun to use, although they might not factor into my everyday professional illustration much (as so much of my work needs to be shown digitally), they're a joy to use for adding an extra flourish onto original watercolour illustrations or ink drawings. I found that the thicker nib pens had a slightly more opaque ink flow than the smaller pin nibs, but obviously with a thick nib you can't get as much detail in - so I'm definitely going to look into buying a 0.7mm bullet tip gold pen which will be perfect for details and the print signing.

The pinks, oranges, red, white and gold were definitely my favourites - I found myself reaching for them again and again to draw with. Maybe the Summer has put me in a warm colour palette kind of mood!

All in all, Posca pens are definitely going to become a staple in my preparatory work, sketches, and print signings - and I think they'll really come into their own when I use them as part of the window illustration trail at LICAF this year!

Head over to the Uniball website to have a browse of their Posca pen line, and if you've tried Posca yourself, show me your creations! 

Note - This is not a paid-for post, although the pen set was provided - I'll always give you my honest opinion :)