DIY - Make Your Own Sparkle Pens

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Make Your Own Sparkle Pens

I adore my Wink of Stella pens. I have clear Wink of Stella, silver, gold and a set of colored Wink of Stella as well. Wink of Stella is great for adding a lovely touch of glitter to pictures. However, the glitter is not a glitter like [easyazon_link identifier=”B00161S5JK” locale=”US” nw=”y” tag=”mygamingweb-20″]stickles[/easyazon_link] but more of a glittery sheen.

Table of Contents

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As well as using Wink of Stella or other brands of sparkle pens to add accents to the coloring pages you can also use it instead of water to activate your Inktense pencils for an entirely different look. Of course, as I was using it quite a bit for that purpose, my Wink of Stella soon ran out.

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Now I could easily make a refill for it and there’s a YouTube tutorial for that below. However, it’s not a long-term solution but does expand the life of your Wink of Stella pens.

Quick & Easy Clear Wink of Stella/Sparkle Pen

A while back I had purchased some[easyazon_link identifier=”B072RT9RTS” locale=”US” tag=”mygamingweb-20″]iridescent medium[/easyazon_link] at my local art shop. I wasn’t sure what I could do with it, but I love to experiment with things and was sure that I would find some purpose for it, eventually.

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There are several companies that make iridescent medium which is usually used to provide “pearlescent effects when added to acrylic paint. Adds shimmer to a painting“. When I mixed my medium with water and applied it to pages that I had colored I noticed that it had the same look as my Wink of Stella pens. As you only need a dab of the medium the tub will last me forever.

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Of course, I had forgotten that I had purchased the [easyazon_link identifier=”B000YQGA2M” locale=”US” nw=”y” tag=”mygamingweb-20″]iridescent medium[/easyazon_link] and ended up buying another brand as well (it’s not only coloring books that I duplicate my orders on lol).

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What You Will Need

To make a clear sparkle pen you will need:

*iridescent medium
*water
*mixing container
*stirrer

To apply you can use a pipette/eye dropper/syringe to transfer the mix to a water brush or just a normal paint brush.

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What You Do

Put a small amount of medium in a mixing pot (about half a teaspoon) and stir in enough water so the mix is not gluggy but slightly runny. You want it so that the mix is not like a paint when applied but like a shimmer. If it is too gluggy it will also clog the water brush if you are using that.

Fill your water brush using a pipette/eyedropper/syringe to transfer the sparkly goodness over. Dab your water brush into the mix just to prime the brush until the sparkles start to flow. You do not need to use a water brush but can use your mixing pot and a brush if you prefer.

That’s it! You are done and can now enjoy never-ending sparkly accents on your pages.

Making Colored Sparkle Pens

Of course, I also wanted to replicate the look of the colored Wink of Stella brushes that I own. Although I do not use these often I do find that they dry out and become a little scratchy so making my own would be a better option.

I considered a lot of different options for the colored pens – eyeshadow, alcohol inks but ultimately I tried to replicate the water-based solutions that the colored brushes are based on. By the way, the reason that I discounted the eyeshadow was that it contains a lot of oils and I wasn’t sure of how this would react long term to the medium.

Inktense Color

In my first experiment, I used scrapings of [easyazon_link identifier=”B001U3QO7O” locale=”US” nw=”y” tag=”mygamingweb-20″]Inktense pencil[/easyazon_link] which I activated in water and added to the sparkling mix.

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To be honest, this would be a lot easier if I had the Inktense blocks and could scrape a bit off. Although, a colored look was achieved with this method I felt that I lost a lot of the vibrancy that the Inktense pencils have.

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Watercolor

The other option I tested in the video was adding some cheap watercolors to the sparkly mix and testing the result. This was my preferred method. It is a lot easier to add more color to the mix and overall easier than scraping bits of Inktense and picking out wood shavings from the mix 🙂

The other advantage with the watercolors is that I think that it would be far easier to mix different colors and know your proportions. This means that even with a small set of 12 you could go wild with color combinations. The set of watercolors I used was from a bargain shop in Sydney, Australia and cost less than $10AUD.

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Hope you have fun experimenting with your sparkle pens and adding dashes of sparkle to your pages.

Happy coloring x

Lea