Try Out Thursday: Derwent Blender Pens

Review of Derwent's Blender Pens that I bought from Art Friend..

  I actually had these blender pens for a while now but never got around to using them....

  They come in this pretty yet simple packaging. Nothing fancy. The back of the pack says, "Derwent Blender pens are designed specifically for use with pencils, allowing the artist to blend away pencil lines for smooth and even colour. They are effective with both colour and graphite pencils. ... Pencil can be layered over the top if required. Use the smaller nib for fine detail."

As you can see, the pack comes with two pens- one 4mm and one 2mm.

The smaller nib is a brownish tone, whereas the larger nib is white. In the picture, the larger nib is slightly blue because of the colours I used it on. However, even though the nib is stained the colours don't transfer if you take care to wipe it on a piece of scrap paper after each use.

  The pens smell kind of like whiteboard markers which might bother some people. I think you just have to use some common sense and keep the room well-ventilated (even pastels are harmful... so.)

  My only grief is that I think a bigger nib would be so useful for coloured pencil artists cause some of us work large scale. A flat and broad nib would be really useful. This would really speed up the time taken to finish a drawing, and I loved how you could still layer more colours on top of it.

I drew a jellyfish and then layered Coloursoft pencils as a background.
The colours dissolved very well. The black ink is from Derwent's Graphik line maker pens, and they didn't smudge. I'm really happy about that cause I now know I can ink the things I draw first, erase the pencil markings, and then colour in the background without worry.

  You might think that the gradation isn't very smooth, but this was from my sketchbook and I didn't lay the coloured pencil strokes down very well, plus I didn't add a second layer to it. But I can tell that the blender pens would work really well for my future works.  I'll definitely be using the blender pens more often in the future.

  Update: To see a before and after comparison of using the Derwent blender pens, click this link to see the magic.

  Now, I need to get my hands on Derwent's blender and burnisher pencils to try them out....... ^-^