NOTE: It's very important that you understand, before you read this list that I am not in any way advocating or urging you to buy any of these items. I have not been, and will not be, reimbursed in any form by any manufacturer or store for writing about these products.
I am supplying this list for informational purposes because people always ask me 10,000 questions about such things. Now you can just read this post.
I want to be perfectly clear that I believe that journaling is about you, your mind, your eye, your hand, and the simplest tools that can get the job done: a favorite pen and a suitable sheet of paper. (Anything more for many people will be superfluous, and for many more it may be detrimental.) All you need then is your time, which you can choose to spend observing and recording.
Going down the rabbit-hole of acquisition of art materials is not going to improve your art or your happiness. Stay with one media you find simple and usable for weeks and even months, honing your skills thinking about your "style" before you branch out into another. Buy a couple items from a line to test the line before plunging into a full set of anything.
Wise people suggest never grocery shopping on an empty stomach. The same wisdom applies to shopping for art supplies when you don't have a conscious plan of action in mind and you feel vaguely out of sorts and begin to believe there just might be a perfect pen out there and you haven't found it yet. There isn't one. There's just the pen in your hand, and that hand, your eye, your mind. You can't get away from yourself. If you haven't been sketching no pen will aid you. Use your mind.
Please read my post Journaling Superstitions #13: Special Tools Make the Difference. I don't want any new journal keepers or any new fake journal keepers to be confused on this point. In fact in past posts I've written that IFJM is a great time to whittle down your tools and focus on one medium for an entire month. This year I happened to create a very mixed media journal. I want to be very clear on my philosophy.
I used the following tools (because not all of them are pens) shown in the above photo:
A: burnishing tool from 3M (for smoothing out items that are glued down).
B: These 3 "Brushables" by Zig marker were used at various times in my fake journal—mostly to outline stamped lettering. I had three very light colors to only give a shadow of color. There is a different color (both light, related tints) on each end of this brush pen. The ink is waterproof and archival.
C: The Sharpie Poster Paint Marker—this is not solvent based and doesn't smell. It is a great opaque white pen.
D: The Pentel Aquash Brush Pen with Light Black Pigmented Ink. I have written about this at the link provided. It is a great pen for sketching.
E: Two Pentel Pocket Brush Pens. A pen I'm never without, a pen I love to sketch with and with which I did the majority of the sketches in the fake journal. You can read about the Pentel Pocket Brush Pen (and it's sister the Color Brush) here. You can see a five part series on sketching with the Pentel Pocket Brush Pen starting here.
F: Several colors of the Faber-Castell Pitt Artist's Brush Pen, along with two of the line's Calligraphy pens. I outline with the brush pens and I sketch with their Calligraphy pen.
G: Laying horizontally above everything is a Staedtler Pigment Liner. Typically I use this pen for writing and sketching in my real journals. It wasn't used at all in this journal. It was on the table for note taking.
H: The Faber-Castell Pitt Artist's Jumbo Brush Pen in white. This is a lovely large brush tip filled with white India ink and very opaque. I carry one of these with me everywhere now that Don Colley has alerted me to them.
I: Montana markers in various tip sizes. The red on the left, pink and white are all 15mm, the orange is 30 mm, and the red on the far right is a fine point. I also used a light blue 15mm, but that's always in my bag so it isn't on the table. These markers are refillable with special acrylic paints. They are made for graffiti artists, but they area great for visual artists of all types. The white is also fairly opaque. I used it for the background on the "peek" with birds everywhere in the background. The fine point red (and on one page the wide nibbed red) was used to write some journaling text throughout the journal.
J: Ziller Acrylic ink (violet and brown) in two little sealed palette cups.
K: A dip nib mounted in a plastic nib holder. (Crowquill nib.) I used this and a G-Nib for various bits of journaling in the fake journal. The acrylic ink worked great over all the various surfaces created on the pages.
L: The other non-pen type tool used in the journal—a big bag (not completely shown) of lots of different designs of washi tape. I doubt this stuff is archival in any way; I expect it to grow old, and slide off the pages, or become brittle, or whatever. But my character didn't care about archival qualities of her materials and she was having so much fun using this tape that even though she wasn't scanning her pages (impossible) to capture the moment I thought, "Aw, wtf, let her do it." And I did.
Everyone of the above products worked great in the fake journal, whether the surface of the page was covered with acrylic paint, a Gelli-arts acrylic paint monoprint, collage paper, or just the exposed original paper of the journal. The Brushables are new to me and this is the first time I've used them much at all. All the other tools I've been using in my own journaling, in different ways, for years; the exception here is the Montana acrylic markers—I used a couple last fall, and then not at all. Then in the past several months I started using them again. I mostly use these markers for quickly filling in backgrounds when I want to isolate the figure. As I did here in a sketch of a beaver at the Bell Museum. Not only are they quick drying but the ink/paint is pretty opaque, and it is fairly matte when dry and easily takes most types of pens that I enjoy using.
Later when you see more of the pages you'll have a sense of what I was using because of this list.
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