I’ve ordered pastel-colored gel pens and ink markers for my online ballpoint pen art. The colors I have are too saturated to be useful for art-making. They’re fine for writing, I guess, though I seldom write analog—pen on paper.

That I’m doing it now, is because I’m so excited. I’ve seen some artists on YouTube using ballpoint pen, and they all color with alcohol-based color markers, since the good ballpoint pen ink is permanent. I’m not sure about the pastel-colored ballpoint pen inks, though, and if it is water-soluble, to what extent. Anyway, I can adjust my order of operations if those pastel-colored ballpoint pens do indeed smudge.

Art is all about adjusting, after all.

R.

handwritten version of this post, with a few spelling errors, that are corrected in the digital text