Blog / 2025 / Why I Prefer Brushes to Paint Pens

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

I don’t have a lot of experience with paint pens—plastic pens that are full of a paint or ink. I’ve only ever used paint pens to make art this one time, with this piece, but I get asked about them all the time, because people see the small lines in my work and assume that I’m using paint pens. I’m not and I’m going to show you how to tell the difference between pens and brushes.

On the left is the paint pen flower people piece, and on the right is a goat kid done with paint and brushes. And, even from afar, the difference between the two kinds of tools is clear, I think, because there are so many more color possibilities when you’re mixing your own colors with paint. And the differences only get more obvious when you look up close.

Each mark with a paint pen is uniform in shape. Yes, these yellow pen strokes, for example, are slightly translucent and there’s a pooling of the ink at the end of each mark before I lift the pen from the paper, but the width of each mark is consistent throughout.

Conversely, each mark with a brush has its own feel. With these yellow brushstrokes, for example, the width of the marks changes over the course of the mark. They start small on the left where I first put the brush to the paper, and then get wider as I allow more of the brush to touch, before getting smaller again as I take the brush away from the paper.

The fact is paint pens don’t do a lot of things that I need to be able to do to make my art.

Like I mentioned before, pens only have so many color options, while paint can be any color I imagine. Along those same lines, pens have pretty much the one kind of mark, while with a variety of brushes I can make lots of different kinds of mark with the same color of paint. Also, pens don’t blend very well and it’s impossible to control the translucence of a paint pen mark, because the opacity of the paint inside the pen can’t be changed by the artist—it’s manufactured a certain way and that’s the way the paint pen’s paint is going to look. Plus paint with brushes has texture! I love the way brushstrokes create tiny topographies on a page as different amounts of paint glob and spread in different ways.

All that is important, but brushes are my go-to for another reason as well. And that’s that they’re hands-down better for the environment. I mean pens in general—even the ones you use to write a note to a friend—they aren’t great for the planet. Companies aren’t manufacturing most pens to be refillable at this point, so all that plastic goes to the dump simply because the ink or paint has run out. Meanwhile, if brushes are high quality, they can last a lifetime. It depends on how well the bristles are attached to the handle and how well you clean the brushes, but I’ve had many of mine for over twenty years.

So, ya, paint pens are more portable, and they’re cleaner in the sense that there’s less potential for dripping. But other than that there are no upsides to paint pens when making the sort of art I want to make, so I don’t use them. I stick to brushes.