10 simple ways to use a Tombow brush pen in your bullet journal for the first time as a beginner

i used to be a beginner too and especially that first time you grab those tombow brush pens it can be a little bit hard so in today's video i'm going to go over five ways that you can use the tombow brush pens inside of your bullet journal we'll also talk about why they're so popular go over some tips and tricks around blending and also doing some brush lettering as an archer and olive design team member i really appreciate the other content that the design team is making so make sure you do too

by hitting that subscribe button below and also don't forget to tap that bell so you can be notified when we have new content for you my name is mark from men who bullet both here on youtube and on instagram and i decided to cover this topic today because there's a lot of different ways that you can use these pens you can use them for hand lettering you can even watercolor with them and i'm also going to show you how to create some really quick headers and use these in some really fun ways so l

et's go ahead and get into it alright so the first thing that we're going to cover as a part of this is how to use the tombow brush pens as actual brush pens so as i mentioned before they have two sides to each one of these pens on the front here and the top is the actual brush pen itself and it's very flexible so it has a lot of give it's not very hard but it's also not too soft that it's really going to kind of instantly like smash on the page and go through so these are really wonderful for a

ctually learning how to brush letter or do calligraphy and then on the other side is more of a bullet tip so this is going to give you that single line as you're working you can use this actually for a faux calligraphy if you wanted to and i'll cover both of those relatively quickly as we go through this so let's go ahead first start with the brush side of this so if you're familiar with calligraphy then you'll know the basic brushes for this but if you've never used a brush pen before or ever d

one calligraphy that's totally okay because we're all learning as we're going through this process so what i'll teach you real quick is a really easy just maneuver that you would do with your hands and i'm a lefty so it's really important for me to make sure that i'm giving myself enough space but whether you're left-handed or right-handed this can work for you the most important thing to remember about it is that when you are doing an upstroke you're going to just keep it nice and thin and when

you're doing a downstroke you're going to put that pressure on that pen so your up strokes are going to be nice and thin and then your down strokes are going to be thicker so when i write a letter like hello for instance like h's are one of my favorite things to draw you go up thin and then you press down up thin and press down again as you go through and the best thing to do at the end here just something i've learned is a little bit of like a flick at the end so i'm going up thin down up thin

down heavy and like a flick and that way i can then connect my next letter [Music] but you can easily write your name you can write headers you can do anything along the lines of that by using your brush pen just as easy as writing tuesday for instance so i would go down with my brush stroke heavy up thin down heavy up thin down heavy the flick then for the other side if you want to just use the bullet side of this and write normal i'll teach you a real quick trick on how to do faux calligraphy

so flow calligraphy follows the same exact rules but you're just going to add an extra down stroke and then fill it in instead so i'll do the same word hello so i'm just going to use the bullet side so it all look nice and easy and i'm just going to do it in cursive as i did it before using those same letters now anywhere where you went on a down stroke you're just going to draw a line and then fill it in and that gives you that look of the calligraphy with the light and the dark pools so we wo

uld go up thin down with that heavy stroke fill it in i also like this because it helps you create that muscle memory too as you're writing out your letters and it creates a really cool faux calligraphy look without having to worry too much about the brush pen side of this all right so the next thing that we're going to go through is actually using the same lettering technique but i'm going to show you how to create gradients utilizing these markers so to do that i'm actually going to take two d

ifferent colors here i'm going to have a lighter color and then i'm going to go with a darker color so the first thing that i'm going to do is actually use my let's go with the lighter color first here and i'm going to write out the day let's do thursday as i'm doing this let me know in the comments below if you own any of the tombow brush pens i'm curious about your experience with them it's nice and bright and then what we're going to do is we're going to take the darker color and we're just g

oing to real quick draw on those down strokes what's amazing about the tombow brush pens is that they're self-cleaning so what that means is i'm going to take this yellow and i'm just going to keep pulling it down to bring that darker color in here and then i don't have to worry about washing this because all i'll have to do is take a paper towel or a scrap piece of paper and you'll see as the gradient starts to go away you go now as you can see i do have some of that extra orange on top of here

so if i wanted to go and use it i could and you'll see that it already has that but usually what i'm doing is i'm just cleaning off my brush and i'll just keep using it until you'll see slowly that the full yellow color comes back there's another trick that you can use for doing this as well and you're going to use a piece of like cellophane or some of the tombow brush pens actually come with a mixing kit on top of it i'm actually going to use the one for from the acrylic graph pens because it'

s made out of the general same material you want something that's shiny that's not porous at all and i'm just going to use the back piece of this paper to do the same exact thing so for that what i'm going to do on top of my blending palette is i'm going to put out a whole bunch of this color here now because these are water-based i can do a lot with the tombow brush pens using this method here i can go in with my lighter color and i can pick up that right and get some of that really cool gradie

nt color here or if you want a lot of the pen kits come with this clear one here which is your mixing pen so that way you can pick up your color [Music] and pick up a lot of that and again because it's self-cleaning as you use it you'll see it'll start to go back to clear i personally like using the pen with the actual pen here instead of that blender that's just my own personal preference there but you get some really cool looking letters doing it this way all right the next technique that i'm

going to show you is actually using the tombow brush pens for watercolor so as i mentioned because they are a water based product you can mix them with water and create some amazing looking pieces here so i'm going to do a very similar thing but without letters this time and i'm just going to put out a handful of colors here for myself so what i'll do here is i'm just going to do a real quick let's just say i draw like a quick mountain for instance [Music] okay and i'm going to go back over ther

e with a black pen but what i would do first you can take a paintbrush or you can take just one of the water pens that you can get and you're just going to put out a little bit of water on top of here okay and then what you can do is you can just pick up that color the same way you would with watercolor and go right over top of your paper [Music] and there you go that's using the tombow brush pens with a watercolor pen or watercolor brush with some water to create a really cool watercolor effect

using those brushes all right the next thing that i'm gonna do here is i'm actually going to use a plastic bag and i'm going to take the watercolor and i'm going to put it on here and i'm going to create a really cool background here for my paper so this is something else that you can do with those tombow pens and water is just take the colors and mix them up and you're just gonna put them on top of a plastic bag it can be any type of plastic bag or cellophane whatever you want you can add and

if in this case i didn't have any of my colors out you could actually go right in with your actual marker and draw right on here then what i'm going to do is i'm going to just take some washi here and i'm just going to lay out a straight line just to show you how you can block off space using washi and then go right over top of it with this method to create some really cool backgrounds this would actually work out wonderfully if you were setting up some headers for yourself so we're going to tak

e that and what we're going to do is take our plastic bag and flip it over and we're just going to press around on here to mix some of that color up then i can go ahead and pull that up and i'd let that dry for just a second and then i could just go ahead and peel off the washi tape which would leave that space there and i could do a few things with this if i wanted to i could just create a really cool header if i wanted to or doodle over top of this and make it look really neat let's create a c

ool looking summer vibe since we're using these colors here and we'll just write summer with the brush pen so really nice and easy way to create some cool headers and pieces inside of your bullet journal the last thing that i'm going to show you is probably the easiest thing that you can do with your tombow brush pens and this is what i actually use the tombow brush pens for the absolute most what i'm going to do is i'm just going to draw a box here and this box could be for anything this could

be for your headers of your pages this could be for an entire box for your task or to do inside of your bullet journal or this could be just something inside of your planner all i'm going to do is draw this space here and i'm going to go ahead and fill in the center with the day of a week [Music] and then what i'm going to do is i'm just going to take this light gray tombow that i have here it's probably you can see that it's extremely well used and all i'm going to do is just draw a drop shadow

underneath this box on the bottom and up the side and what's really great about the tombow brush pens is that if you want to you can layer them on top of each other so if this light gray was too light for me i wanted it to come out a bit more i would just go over it a second time with the same brush pen to create a really cool drop shadow on my box now that you know some fun and creative ways to use these tombow brush pens i'm sure you're eager to get started and learn more our design team has

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nd also tap that bell so we can let you know when we have more content coming up and i've got some videos here at the end for you that i think you're gonna like