Looking to add an extra special touch to your coloring book pages?
You can elevate your coloring and add flare to solid colors and beautiful designs with glitter pens!
Glitter, of course, requires balance - if you use too much of it, it’s overwhelming (too much of a good thing). But if you use too little, you can hardly see the sparkle.
So if you can walk this line and find a perfect glitter pen balance point, glitter pens will really enhance your design, emphasizing and highlighting the details of your drawings beautifully. We’ve got suggestions on how to do just that below. Because when it comes to coloring books, glitter pens are the perfect touch to add to your coloring adventures!
So think beyond using only colored pencils, markers, or colored pens the next time you’re coloring in your coloring book. Glitter pens are just the thing to add a little glitz and energy to your artwork.
The benefits of coloring
Even the most productive among us need time to relax, regroup, and refresh. Did you know coloring can provide you all of those things?
Coloring provides so many relaxation and mindfulness benefits - it improves your focus, reduces stress, increases creativity by tapping into the right side of your brain while giving the left side of your brain a break (all that logical, rational, goal oriented-ness takes place there). Drawing is also a great option and achieves similar benefits!
Pairing the act of coloring with inspirational designs and messages is perfectly balanced in Ink+Volt’s Inspirational Coloring Book. You’ll get the benefits of feeling both relaxed and uplifted after coloring the 22 inspirational quotes that are intertwined within intricate illustrative designs.
How to use glitter pens for coloring
It’s unlikely you’ll color an entire coloring book page using glitter pens, but you could. Just because you can, though, doesn’t mean you should!
Instead, glitter pens are more of an accent piece, and one that you use sparingly to draw attention to certain features of a design that you want to stand out.
Here are 4 ways to incorporate glitter pens into your coloring book pages, and tips for finding a perfect balance of glitter with other non-glitter colors:
1. Outline shapes or focal points. Look at your coloring book page and search for thin lines outlining borders of elements that can be enhanced with glitter, or look for large pieces of the design that you want to highlight. These are perfect areas of the coloring book page to add glitter. If you don’t see already drawn-in lines around one of the elements that you want to turn into a focal point, you can make your own by using the glitter pen first to color along the border, then to color within that line with a solid, non-glitter color. Using glitter pens in this way allows you to highlight certain objects and add another layer of visual interest.
2. Color in small details. This time, identify where the little details are on the coloring page and consider using glitter pens to color them in completely. Little flowers, stars, or the eyes of animals/people will stand out so much more when you use glittery colors. By coloring in small elements sprinkled throughout a page, the glitter won’t be overwhelming. For example, in a field of flowers, color some in with glitter pens at random as if they were scattered by the wind.
3. Layer glitter on top of gel pen ink or marker. After you use a solid color, you can use a glitter pen in the same color (or a shade lighter or darker) to:
- outline over the solid color
- color over the solid color completely
- use short strokes to create little lines close together or far apart
- add stippling (tiny little dots close together or far apart)
- incorporate hatching (criss cross patterns close together or far apart)
- add swirly circles of different sizes
These techniques will add texture to otherwise solid colors that become even more unique with the use of a glitter pen. For example, you can use short strokes to create the effect of individual feathers on a bird, or use stippling in the center of a flower. This is where your creativity can really start to come alive.
4. Blend, mix, or add shading after using a wet, solid color gel pen by pooling that ink on the paper, then using the glitter pen to spread the solid colored ink while adding glitter too. You can create a faded effect or a lighter glitter pattern, depending on whether you shade or mix the inks. You can also use a small paintbrush to mix or blend the two inks.
Our favorite glitter pens
To try the techniques above, you’ll need some awesome glitter pens to get the job done.
- Wink of Stella Glitter Pens are the perfect glitter pen if you’re looking for a subtle glitter effect. These high quality Japanese pens come in pink, blue, green, yellow, brown, and purple. You can use them for coloring, but they’re also great for your journals, planners, notes, or crafts! They’re water based pigment pens, making it more of a pen-marker hybrid. It has a fatter tip than other glitter pens recommended below, at 0.8mm. These would be a good option for coloring in details and elements completely or coloring over other colors rather than using it for mixing, blending, or using them for very small details because of the type of ink and larger tip size.
- For a gel based glitter pen with a finer tip (0.5mm), we love the Gelly Roll Meteor Stardust gel pens. They come in silver-star, marine-star, copper-star, pink-star, green-star, and blue-star for a fun array of colors.
- Gelly Roll Metallic gel pens are another great gel pen option with a 0.4mm pen tip, even better for coloring in fine lines and details. Both of these gel pens would be great for any of the techniques described above.
