Gel Crayons

When hanging out with my friends recently, Cayden showed me these.

They’re gel crayons.  Which is very weird.  Shortly before though, I’d seen DrawWiffWaffles video on YouTube that used a branded version of the same kinda thing.

So of course I had to have a play.  I did consider making them part of a series I have planned, but decided not to in the end – mostly because of the timeliness of Waffles’ video.

Because these belong to someone else, they aren’t the same shape as they were new, but you can get the general gist.  You can twist the barrel to move more crayon up too – which is nice.  And fun to do.

So step one is swatching.  They are really creamy, and slick.  It feels like drawing with a lipstick.  The leaflet inside says that you can use your fingers to blend them, so I had a go at that too, as well as blending just using the crayons, and drawing on top of the crayon with another crayon.

As we all know, I like to make dome monsters when I test new supplies.   I was with friends, and I like to ask people to help make decisions when designing monsters.  How many eyes?  Happy or sad?  Fangs showing?  That sort of thing.  Thanks to the utter oddness of my friends, I ended up with this.

I liked the responses, it’s just hard to be accurate with these things.  I considered doing some more tests on the swatching page – seeing how fine a line I could get (because Waffles managed to be fairly accurate and detailed) – but I couldn’t be bothered.  I’d also considered testing how they worked with ink liners – would they obscure any inking, would any inking on top ruin the ink pen?  But again, couldn’t be bothered.  We were having a very chill day.

So I started a second dome monster instead.  I planned on using fire colours, but then I couldn’t figure out what colour to do her wings.

I considered the neon orange, but wasn’t sure if it was too bright.  So I decided I’d test out some layers and do a second swatching/testing page – including the inking, and how fine a line I could get out of them.

The inking surprised me.  I’d expected them, or the non-neon ones at least, to completely cover the line.  And I’d expected inking on top of them to mess up the ink pen a bit.  Inking on top is easy and smooth.  After a few lines it does block the nib, but a quick scribble on scrap paper and it’s all good.

It is possible to get some relatively fine lines with these things too – as Waffle showed.  I just didn’t have the time or the inclination to try.  Maybe if they were my art supplies and I had plenty of time to practice with them?

But I managed to finish my little fire dome monster.

Cayden hadn’t really been doing massive art pieces with them either.  He’d picked them up because they were discontinued and on sale and really cheap.  He picked them up as a novelty.  And he was using them to do some random, not-really-paying-attention-or-putting-much-effort-in colouring.

And then my friends and I played Dungeons & Dragons, because we are nerds 😀