Come see the amazing gel pen blending tool I discovered! You probably even have one in your kitchen drawer. 😉

This video references the following:

Products Used

Betty Crocker Double Spatula – Silicone
http://amzn.to/2fmuJU5

GelWriter 100 Premium Gel Pens in Stadium Stand
http://amzn.to/2esV9ps

Sakura Gelly Roll Metallic Pen Sets set of 5
http://amzn.to/2fmrcoM

Gelly Roll Stardust Bold Point Pens 6/Pkg
http://amzn.to/2fmv7lq

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Video Transcript

Hi everyone this is Jennifer Stay from Coloring Pages Bliss and I’m here today to share with you a new coloring tool that’s going to help you with your gel pen coloring. Now you guys know me, I love my gel pens and I do a lot of coloring. I’ve done some tutorials already here on my YouTube channel all about how to color with these wonderful tools. In the description of this video there are some links all set up and ready for you to lead you right to my tutorials and help you get started if you’d like to learn more about the things that I’ve talked already about blending and just general coloring, storing, and all kinds of things all about gel pens.

Today have a new tool to help us with our coloring. I’ve had a problem with my gel pen blending. Let me show it to you so you can see what the issue is, now when you look close up, this is a coloring page out of my coloring book where I do a lot of experimenting and testing of different techniques, and if you look close up here this is some gel pen blending I’ve been doing. You can see where the gel pen blending looks really pretty, but it also looks really scratchy. This happens when the two colors come together and the tip of the pen is used to blend those colors together, and sometimes it’ll actually scratch the paper, and it’ll kind of dig up the paper, and you get this really scratchy texture. When you drag your hand across it even feels really rough along those edges. I really don’t like that look, the color itself is pretty but the scratchy look I haven’t been a fan of.

I’ve been doing a lot of pondering trying to figure out how to fix this issue and I have finally solved this problem and I’m so excited to share this with you, and help you with your coloring and blending as well, so let me show you the tool that I discovered that solves all these problems. You’re going to be so excited too I believe because it is an inexpensive and fantastic tool that you might have already in your house right now. Here it is. It’s a spatula, and it’s a silicone spatula to be specific. It does a fantastic job with blending and smearing the gel pen. I can’t wait to show you.

I didn’t have a really nice silicone spatula in my kitchen, all the silicone spatulas I have are sort of chewed up, and messed up along the edges, and I wanted one that was very smooth so that I could get a very nice clean smear. I headed straight to my dollar store, where else are you going to go right? Actually the first place I went was online, because I knew that there would be some art supplies that would be made out of silicone. I’ve seen them in my art store before and I wanted to see what was available. I found all kinds of silicon paintbrushes and different kinds of tools and they were very expensive, and I didn’t want to invest that kind of money when I knew that there were silicone spatulas out there that I could buy. So that’s when I took my son and we went straight to the dollar store and sure enough, they’re on the wall was this wonderful spatula by Betty Crocker. It’s fantastic. It was in this little package right like this and hanging on the wall. The thing I love about this is that the ends pop off just like this. It’s a little stiff but that’s ok. I can take one of these ends and tuck them into a pencil case and take it with me. If it’s right in my hand in fact, you can also take it and tuck it on the end of a pen if you want to and use it that way too. It’s fantastic and you get to tools for the price of one dollar, so this is a fantastic deal. I’m sure most dollar stores will have some type of silicone spatula, or you can probably find one in your kitchen right now. You’ll want to look and make sure you find a spatula that says silicone on it. There’s something to do with the silicone that makes it so that the gel ink doesn’t stick to it at all, and it will help that smear happen so easily.

Let me demonstrate this to you right now. As you know I usually use my finger to do the smear, and it works great but this is almost like magic. Ok I’ve zoomed in and we’re going to start out by demonstrating the silicone spatula technique with the jellyroll metallic Sakura pen. The reason I picked this one is because you want to use a pen that has good juicy ink and has a long drying time. And you can see here that I get a pretty good smear using my hand and of course I get a pretty inky finger doing this, but you know me I don’t care about getting messy, but what is sad is that we’re getting a lot of ink here instead of having the ink on the paper.

One of the good things about this technique is that we’re going to end up with all of the ink on the paper, and very little of the ink anywhere else. I’m going to clean off the spatula from other uses, I haven’t cleaned this in a long time, I want to see how little amount of the ink ends up on the spatula. There, the spatula is really clean and now what we’re going to do is lay down some of this ink. I usually go back over a couple times really lightly, so it’s really good and juicy, and then when you smear it you get a really good smear. Look at that twice as long pull of that ink across the page. That’s about the same amount of ink, I tried my best to be equal there, but we get twice the coverage on that so that’s really impressive.

Let’s check out the spatula; its still almost clean so all that ink, instead of having some of it on my fingers, is right there on our coloring page where we want it to be. Let’s try another color and see if we can get the same results with a different color. Here is my metallic kind of a mulberry color here not sure which color it is, and we’re going to do the same thing: start by laying down a couple layers, and test it out with my finger. Didn’t get very good results there. I’m going to do it one more time with my finger so we’re fair because I think what’s happened here is the tip is a little bit clogged. Okay that’s better. Now we will do the same thing with the spatula. You have to move kind of quick to the spatula so you get the best smear possible. Look at that. Again almost double the length in this in the smear. Very impressive.

Let’s do one more this time. We’re going to move to let’s do the purple, this is from their Stardust line jellyroll Stardust line, so this is a sparkly one, not a metallic. We’ll see what kind of results we get here. Again lay down just tiny bit and then go back and forth really light so you’re laying down a lot of ink. And that’s what we get with the smear I’m using our finger. Now let’s see what we’re going to get using the spatula. Again this is a silicone spatula and the silicone really works well. Look at that smear. It kind of repels the ink and keeps it on the paper instead of on me or on the spatula.

The idea for this coloring page is that I’d like to use the gel pens to create sort of a modeled effect, so that the leaf looks like it has changed into beautiful autumn colors. I’m going to use the silicone spatula tool to help meld the colors together and give it a beautiful smooth blended look rather than that scratchy, hard to blend look that I was getting before. Over here you can see what we’re working towards. Look how beautiful this is all the colors have been mixed together and I’ve used these beautiful pens by gel writer here I picked out a bunch of autumn tones. I started with the light, medium, and dark, and then added a few extras to give some depth to the color palette. They all work together really pretty. I kind of stayed in each section as you’re going to see as I demonstrate it, and then I ended by adding a metallic gold around the border of the leaf.

That’s kind of the goal of what we’re going to do here. I started of course with my secret technique of using a highlighter. This is a broad tip highlighter, and so it goes across the page really quick and makes that first base layer step really easy and fast. That was really an easy thing to do to add a lot of depth. That’s going to make that leaf almost glow, and that’s why I use it. Then I’m going to go ahead and dive in and demonstrate how amazing the silicone spatula can make these colors smear and blend together.

What I did is I just kind of went for it at first. I started by using the darks down here in the center and blending outward. Then I decided to just go for it because when you look at fall leaves, the colors are just everywhere across that leaf, and you don’t have to be very particular. Just have fun, relax and just enjoy the way the colors move and smear across the page. The only thing I really did was sort of tried to stay and inside each triangular area, and that kind of gave me a guide and a zone to work in. that was helpful especially since the gel dries so quickly.

You want to work in small areas because that will help with your blending so that you don’t lay down too much ink, and then you find yourself in a bit of a problem because you have laid it down and then it’s dried, and you weren’t able to blend the way you wanted to. You can see sometimes I’m smearing and sometimes I’m doing sort of a stirring blending type action. As you work with gel and the spatula you’ll discover what works best for you. I leave the caps off as I’m working and I just kind of keep all the pens that are in the area handy, and ready to go. I keep the spatula in my hand almost constantly, so you end up having usually a couple tools in your hand at once and so it’s a bit of a learning curve to figure out how it works best for you.

I think that’s why I like this tiny little end of the spatula better than the larger one because it fits so nice and neat inside my hand when I have more than one pen I’m working with. Here I’ve done just a straight-up light too dark, well dark to light blend, and you can see how easily that worked using the spatula. It’s so smooth, if you put your hand over; there are no scratchy lines and it just looks lovely.

Now we’re going to go for the modeled effect that I was doing over here on these other two leaves. Let me show you how I was doing that. The way I did that was more just kind of went for it, and the fun thing about doing it this way to is that you don’t have to worry about the colors getting on the edge of your spatula and contaminating the next color, because that’s sort of what you want to have happen with this modeled autumn leaf look. Now that we’ve got the leaf all filled in I can look back and kind of make sure that there aren’t any areas that I feel like are out of proportion. Of course we’re looking for a really random look, but here in this area I feel like there’s way more yellow than anywhere else, so I’m just going to add a tiny bit of a different color, and smear it out. That will kind of give it a little bit more of a balanced look.

Then I’m going to go ahead and put the caps on, and we’re going to actually add a tiny bit of green into this leaf. If you look at autumn leaves, they all have a touch of green still in them, so this will make it have just a bit more dimension, and look even more realistic. We’re going to get these caps on real quick, make sure we get the click on each one to preserve the life of our pens. We’ll have our spatula ready and I just kind of go in and give a random spot of the green and smear it in. maybe ill come up in this yellow area, and add the green. Not a whole lot of green, I guess I could do anything I want here of course, but I’m trying to match what I did on the other leaves. What I did was not a whole lot of green. That looks good.

Of course if you feel like you did a spot with too much green you could add on top, and layer it a little bit. That will help a little bit tone it down. Then the final step, which I leave to the end, is to fill in this border with the gold and it will sort of clean up your edges, and hide any of spots where you went out of the lines as you went. That is how I color an autumn leaf using gel pens, and my new tool, and sort of a smear modeled technique. I’m going to go ahead and finish coloring this, and then I’ll show you the end result. I’ll also put links to all these awesome tools in the description of my video, and there will be a link to this coloring page also in the video so you can check that out. Make sure you like this video for me, and subscribe to my channel so you won’t miss out on any of my future videos. Thanks for watching; I hope you have a beautiful colorful blissful wonderful day bye.