Mixing Zig Clean Color Pens with Colored Pencil

I’m always trying something crazy art-wise – and mixing Zig Clean Color Pens with Colored Pencil is something I hadn’t yet attempted. So let’s see if it works, shall we?

But first…HI! I’m Sandy and I color all the things. 🙂

I stamped up the whole set of stamps from the recent Summer of Stamping release, called Summer Circles – and it was perfect for this idea cooking in my head! Zigs are SUCH bright colors, they were a must to use with these cute images.

I stamped them on Canson XL, which works great with water-based markers, using Versafine Onyx ink – since I’d be using water to move the marker around. I wanted something watrproof! I added the Zigs loosely, and painted them loosely as well so these would have an underpainting that felt loose and swooshy.

Adding water is the swooshy part for sure! Just put a little mark in a corner and it moves easily with a Silver Black Velvet brush. Sometimes TOO easily – I struggle to get these markers under control. Ha!

Once the watercolored parts dried, it was time to see how Polychromos Pencils worked on top of them…and I was delighted to see they did really really well! The colors were duller, but since it’s shadows I was adding, that was perfect- shadows ARE duller.

The pencil also added texture in a few places too, and with a few uniball white gel pen dots this would look just like sand. Note that you definitely want to do the pencil AFTER the Zig pens.

Once the coloring was complete I had a couple choices – since I went outside the lines I couldnt use the dies that came with the set – oops! That little white border was going to be a problem. Instead I found a punch that was 1-1/2″, just a little smaller than the circles, and punched three of them from a strip of black! Then it was easy to align them on top of 3 circles for a nice feature element on my card.

Since I had 6 circles – I got two cards out of a morning of coloring – not bad at all! The sentiment is from another Summer of Stamping set – Aloha!

Hope you might try this sometime! While Zigs can’t do a lot of fine detail, they give you the color punch – and you can leave the detail and shading to the pencils!

Sandy