One effective way to blend colors when using watercolor brush pens involves slightly overlapping the different shades or colors while they are still wet.
Blending colors with watercolor brush pens allows you to create smooth transitions and gradients in your artwork. While dedicated blending pens exist (often filled with clear water), you can also achieve beautiful blends directly with the watercolor brush pens themselves using techniques that leverage the wetness of the ink.
Blending Technique: Overlapping Wet Colors
As highlighted in the provided reference, a fundamental technique for blending multiple colors or shades involves applying them close together and allowing the wet inks to mingle.
Here's how to use this method based on the reference:
- Apply your first color: Lay down your initial watercolor brush pen color on the paper.
- Apply your second color nearby: Immediately apply your second color adjacent to the first.
- Slightly Overlap: Slightly overlap the edge of the first color with the edge of the second color.
- Allow Blending: Since the watercolor ink in the brush is already wet, this slight overlap causes the colors to naturally blend where they meet.
This technique relies on the wet-into-wet principle, where wet color applied next to or into other wet color spreads and mixes, creating a seamless transition. The reference specifically mentions this causes them to "blend a little already since the watercolor in the brush is already wet."
Tips for Effective Blending with Brush Pens
To get the best results when blending watercolor brush pen colors by overlapping:
- Work Quickly: Watercolor ink dries relatively fast. To ensure smooth blending, apply and overlap the colors while they are still wet.
- Control Pressure: Use varying pressure on the brush pen tip to control the amount of ink flow and the width of your strokes. Lighter touches can create finer lines for subtle overlaps.
- Use Quality Paper: Watercolor paper or smooth, thick paper designed for wet media will perform better than standard paper, allowing the colors to blend more smoothly without bleeding excessively or pilling the paper surface.
- Experiment: Practice overlapping different color combinations to see how they interact and blend.
By applying colors side-by-side and slightly overlapping them while the ink is wet, you can achieve beautiful and controlled blends directly with your watercolor brush pens, leveraging the inherent properties of the medium.
