Tips for colouring with fibre-tip pens

Fibre-tip pens contain liquid ink that is dispensed onto the paper. The word liquid is important here, because this is where the difficulty generally lies when you are using fibre-tip pens for colouring. The liquid ink can make the paper so damp as to damage its structure, and that’s when the typical spots can occur. Anyone trying to fill an area with spidery or uneven strokes, or even curves will inevitably encounter this problem.

Hence it’s better to work with uniform strokes, placing light zigzags or parallel lines close together. Cross-hatching can also work, although it does involve going over the same points at least twice. Ideally this should be avoided in order to protect the paper. If you use parallel lines and follow the shape of the area you’re colouring, you should be able to create an even and what’s more an interesting Picture.

Fibre-tip pens are not the best for creating even transitions between colours. But that doesn’t mean you always have to cover areas with a single colour – it’s worth having a go at transitioning from one colour to another.

It can work well to use light strokes to fade out one colour and light strokes to fade into another colour. You can also create an attractive transition between colour areas using lots of tiny dots – like pointillism.

Even if you can conjure up transitions between colours using fibre-tips, they tend to be more suitable for colouring in larger-scale, eye-catching areas. So a good rule is to keep things simple and let the colours do the talking. Some shades work better together (or next to each other) than others.

If you keep using harmonious colour combinations, you’ll keep on producing beautiful results!