Choosing the Best Watercolor Marker

Choosing the best watercolor marker for your creative practice may seem daunting. There are many brands, styles, and colors of pens and markers available. How do we figure out which brand would be the best for us?

Today I will share with you my experiences using watercolor markers and what to look for when purchasing a watercolor marker.

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Choosing the Best Watercolor Marker

There are several things to consider when choosing the best watercolor marker to use for your creative practice.

What are You Using Your Markers For?

The first consideration is what are you using your markers for? Do you want a thick or thin marker, a brush tip, or a bullet tip? Are you using the markers to write in a journal or for calligraphy? Are you planning to draw with them creating wet blends on watercolor paper? Do you intend to use these markers to be a replacement for a watercolor palette? How you ultimately want to use these pens will determine what type of pen that you purchase.

Fine Liners

There are a variety of fine liner pens that are water-soluble which can be used as watercolor markers. These are excellent for writing or adding details into your art pieces and can blend beautifully with water.

Brush Pens

There are also a variety of brush pens available. These watercolor pens give you a juicy and inky brush strokes that add a lot of color onto your surface. These pens are excellent for calligraphy because they can create thin and thick strokes depending on the pressure you apply.  

Dual Brush Pens

Many watercolor markers come in a dual brush pen format. These markers are a great choice because they have both a fine liner tip and brush tip in one marker. This gives these pens a lot of versatility as you basically have 2 pens in one marker.   

Pen Caps

Usually, the failing point for a marker is not the ink, but the quality of the pen design and the caps. This is one reason I would suggest purchasing the best marker that you can afford. You will end up with a well-designed marker that will last a very long time. I have had some of my markers for 15 years and they work as well today as when I first purchased them.

Pen Brands

There are many brands of watercolor markers in a variety of colors and styles. I generally stick with a brand that has a long history of making watercolor markers. The brands that I can recommend because I use their pens in my creative practice are Zebra Mildliner, Tombow Dual Brush Pens and Marabu Graphix Aqua pens.

Other brands that I can suggest are Zig and Winsor & Newton. I haven’t personally tested their watercolor pens, but I own a variety of their other pens. These brands make quality products and have been making pens for a very long time.

Pigment or Dye-Based Ink

Most watercolor markers are filled with a dye-based ink while a few brands use pigment watercolor in their markers. Be aware that whether you are using pigment watercolor or dye-based watercolor, both mediums will be fugitive. Fugitive means that they will be affected by sunlight, humidity, or other environmental factors.

The better the quality of the dye or pigment in your marker, the more lightfast the color will be. This is the reason there is such a range in price between watercolor pens. As I spend most of my time working in a journal, this generally doesn’t concern to me. But if you plan to have your work exposed to light, you may want to invest in a higher quality marker.  

Price

There is a large range of price with watercolor markers, and my suggestion is to purchase what you can afford. Watercolor markers can run from less than a dollar per marker up to $10 or more per marker. The more expensive the marker, usually the better design of the pen and quality of the ink.

I would suggest purchasing a smaller set of pens and expanding on your collection over time instead getting cheaper but larger set of pens. As colors can be blended and mixed, you don’t need to have a huge set of pens to create beautiful projects.

Testing Pens

I tested the pens I own for the sake of comparison. Here is my testing sheet for your reference.

In this test I tested 4 brands of markers: Tombow Dual Brush Pens, Marabu Graphix Aqua Pens, Marvy Le Plume II and Crayola Fine Liner Pens.

Tombow Dual Brush Pens

Tombow Dual Brush pens come in 107 colors, but they also manufacture a blender brush. As these pens are a dual brush design, they have the benefits of being both a fine liner and a brush pen. I find that the fine liner is not as thin as some of the other brands and the brush pen tip has a very soft brush.

The color is vibrant and blends out beautifully without showing a mark. I have had a set of these pens for almost 15 years, and they still write beautifully.

Marvy Le Plume II Pens

The Marvy Le Plume pens write and work very similarly to the Tombow pens and come in 108 colors. They are a dual brush pen but have a thinner fine liner than the Tombow pens. I enjoyed using them but after 3-5 years they slowly dried out. Currently, I only have one pen left of the 12-pen set that I started with. I wouldn’t recommend these as they have a similar price point to the Tombow markers and the Tombow Dual Brush pens are better made.

Marabu Graphix Aqua Pens

I recently purchased a set of Marabu Graphix Aqua pens and have been very impressed with the quality of these markers. They are a dual brush pen, and the dye-based color is vivid. They blend out beautifully, but they do hold an edge more than the Tombow Dual Brush pens. As I love using watercolor pens for urban sketching, I prefer a pen that will hold a slight edge, so this design feature is ideal for me.

These pens have a slightly stiffer brush nib which I find easier to control and work with. The shape of the barrel of the marker is thicker than the Tombow or Marvy markers, which I find more comfortable when I am drawing for an extended period.

These pens come in 24 colors, which is less than some other brands. I tend to mix my colors together, so I don’t feel that having less color choices poses a problem. If anything, it helps me from being overwhelmed by choice.

Crayola Fine Line Markers

Crayola fine liners are a good economy option for watercolor pens. The colors are vibrant, but when blended do not give as smooth of a blend as high-quality markers. As they are not a dual brush pen, this limits the options of what you can do with them. By using the side of the marker, you can get a thicker line than with the tip. They are a good economy option that uses cheaper dye-based ink, but they are a great option if you have a limited budget.

Which Watercolor Marker will You Choose?

Which of these watercolor markers will you choose? I hope that this gives you confidence for choosing the best watercolor marker for your creative practice. Generally, most of the pens work quite similarly, it’s the quality of the ink and build of the pen that is the biggest differentiator. A lot of it also comes down to personal preference and what you like to draw, write, or blend with these pens.  

I would love to know which watercolor marker you use in your creative practice. Please leave a comment below and I would love to start a conversation with you!

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