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This is our second article on adding detail with a pen in Glass painting. I was fairly happy with the pens I used previously but they did have some issues. In this article I review two “Paint Pens”. One is a proper Vitrea 160 pen by Pebeo. It was quite expensive (relatively) and the tip was quite thick. I must also admit that the one I used was very old! The other was a generic paint pen made by a company called Zeyar. I bought this off Ebay and it was quite cheep. This company makes 3 sizes of nib and I chose the middle one (1.2mm).
Whilst this isn’t a technique you will want to use all the time it does have it’s uses. Our next big project will incorporate it.
In the video we review each pen and try with the paint both underneath and on top of the paint. As an extra test I also tried painting to the pen line as if it were outliner. Just something I thought I’d give a go.
If you do give it a go then we would be really interested to know how you get on. You can either leave a comment at the end of this article, post some thing on the video on YouTube or comment on our Facebook page.
Adding detail with a pen in Glass painting.
How the Pens worked.
Both pens worked well. The Vitrea pen didn’t cover quite as well as the other one but this is probably because it is old. The “ink” didn’t move for three of the paints but did seem to have a small issue with Marubu paint. It was OK if you flood filled over it but if you actually tried to brush over the lines they did move a little (see image on the right).
Again they both worked fine when drawing on top of dried paint. No issues with any of the paints. In some ways this was better and clearer than painting on top of the pen. My reservation would be thinking it may seem tidier and last longer if it is under the paint. This is something I will only be able to test over a couple of years.
Painting to the line.
As an experiment I tried painting to the pen line as if it were outliner. Whilst possible it was actually quite difficult. The line has a very small thickness too it so you really couldn’t use the flood fill method. Instead it was more like filling in a colouring book. I finished the small sample but wasn’t really happy with the end result. I would use this method again but only if it were impossible to avoid (and I really can’t think of a situation where that might happen.
Summery.
I can see this technique being very usful but I will take care not to over use it. My next step will be to buy the smallest Paint marker (0.8mm) to give me a range of 3 diggerent sizes to use in my work.
