Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Zig Clean Color Watercolor Markers

Recently I bought a few of the Zig Clean Color Watercolor Markers...I wanted to see how they preformed and how they worked on different papers.


They come in 80 different colors and they all have this lovely brush tip.



So I started off by just coloring a bit on some watercolor paper (140 lb cold press)  - I used sort of the flat side of the brush to make the first block.  I wanted to see what type of fine lines they could make using just the tip and I was surprised how thin a line you can achieve and finally just a block of solid color.


I then used a watercolor brush to blend and I like how easy it was to spread the color around.   You could go very dark to a really pale color if you choose - even with this bright red.


I dabbed just a bit of blue on the paper to see what it looked like...love the color.


Now I had heard that it didn't work so well on regular cardstock and that is true.  I colored the back side of this bear (coloring book page) with the brown and then tried to spread the color...didn't work at all.  The ink soaks into the cheaper paper so quickly there is very little movement if any at all.


Now you can dab the ink on a craft mat and pick it up with a waterbrush to paint on cheaper papers and/or plain cardstock.  It worked fairly well.  I used 3 different browns here and they all showed up quite nicely.


This time I stamped an image on Neenah cardstock - it did work a bit better as I was able to blend and move the colors a bit but you still see the darker brush strokes of the dark orange I used.  The lighter color of orange did blend away completely.


Next I tried it on a 140 lb cold press smooth watercolor paper - LOVE this look...colors blended so nice and you can see where I also tried the green and blue - lovely color transitions/blending.  


This is a rough cold press - for some reason the stamp ink didn't dry as quickly on here so I got a bit of black ink blended into the Clear Color.  If you ignore that the colors still blended amazingly well.  

I want to play with them a bit more but I'd say these are perfect watercolor markers if used on watercolor paper, regular cardstock or cheaper papers - not so much.    

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for doing this...I'll look for these at a local craft store. They'll be a nice addition to my watercolors! Anne

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  2. Thanks for another great product review. I've seen these mentioned around the net but I haven't seen them in any stores. I'll probably try a couple, but I've got so many different watercolor-type products that I'm going to tell myself that I can't get them. We know how that's going to work, lol!

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  3. Try Bristol Paper. It works amazingly well.

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