Kuretake Clean Color Brush Pens

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A bit of a divergence from my usual knitting topic but I've been drawing a bit recently. I'm a sucker for a nice notebook. I love the Leuchtturm 1917 notebooks. I have an A5 one for my everyday notebook/bullet journal but I recently bought one of the smaller pocket ones.



I'm planning on using it to write all my knitting notes in and put some sketches in.


The other thing that I've bought recently is the most amazing brush pens. The Kuretake Zip Clean Color Real brush pens. I bought mine from Cult Pens, who have always been easy to deal with. The pens are Japanese and from a lot of shops come directly from Japan. I just bought a selection of pens but I've put another order in for more, as I love them so much.



The pens have an actual brush tip to them. You can get a really fine line or thick one - depending on the pressure you use. They blend with one another. The really good thing is they are water soluble, so you can get some really nice effects with very little effort.


The only downside I've found is the paper has to be cartridge or watercolour paper to use water with them - they're absolutely fine on any type of paper if you don't use the water. I used them in a colouring book and it did bleed through. You can get quite a bit of blending without the water though.



This one is in my standard moleskine notebook and I haven't used any water. If you go over same section more than once the colour deepens. What I think is really cool, is the soft colours. The light grey is great for adding shadows. I'm attempting to draw something every day, so I'll see how it goes.


This one is on cartridge paper. I was just doodling and trying out the different effects you can get. All the colours have water added to them and combined with the Pigma marker really makes the pictures sing.



The bottom left image is a colouring book and I've used the colours without water. You can still get some nice effects and blending.

I'm working on a creative lettering idea at the moment. It's the first verse from The Tyger by William Blake.


Anyway, as you can perhaps tell I think these pens are brilliant and I'm looking forward to filling my sketchbook up.

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