How I make color brush pens

Adding some color to my beloved pocket brushes

my current brush pens: blue, magenta, “lemon,” and black

Hey y’all,

Last October I wrote about my beloved Pilot Pocket Brush pens. If you watched the most recent diary walkthrough, you might’ve noticed that I added a blue spot color in January, which immediately gave the diary a new feel:

still from my winter diary walkthrough

The way I made this blue brush pen was to simply take an exhausted cartridge from one of the black brush pens and refill it with blue ink using my ink pot and syringe method. (I’ve discovered that syringes can be hard to shop for? I use these blunt-tipped ones.)

Here’s how I refill the brush pen cartridges with an ink pot and syringe

I used Lamy fountain pen ink — the same kind of black ink I use to refill my black brush pen. I like that it’s a little bit watery and doesn’t bleed as much as the super thick black Pilot ink that comes with the brush pens.

Now, why bother with this method when you can actually buy colored brush pens? First, I really love these specific pocket brushes. Second, it winds up being cheaper and a lot less wasteful to refill the cartridges. Third, using the syringes, I can actually mix inks in the cartridges to get weird colors — I keep my blue brush “pure,” but sometimes I’ll pop a little blue ink in the black cartridge for fun.

It’s springtime in Texas, and color is everywhere. This week I thought, “Why stop with blue?” I bought a batch of new pocket brush pens and some magenta and “lemon” ink and made a set of CMYK brushes.

For the magenta and lemon inks, I rinsed out and dried some spent cartridges before I filled them. I wrapped colored washi tape around the pens to keep track of which is which.

Here’s what my test page looked like: