These water brush pens are a fun and easy way to create watercolors from pigment or from watercolor pencil linework.

The pens unscrew the opposite way that machines and screws usually twist on and twist off, they’re lefty-tighty righty-loosy, if that makes any sense. I’m not sure why they are this way but it’s pretty funny.

The brushes work pretty easily:

Unscrew the water container end (lefty-tighty righty-loosy)
Fill with water
Screw the water container back onto the pen
Squeeze the sizes to get the water into the pen reservoir
Draw with water!

For this drawing, I made an ink drawing using a Kuretake pen, the double-sided no.55 Kuretake. I gently ran one of the water brushes on the edges of the drawn lines, which were already dry for about an hour, to create the effect around the flowers,

For this drawing, I made a drawing with watercolor pencil, and then ran the water pens over the pencil. This is on Traveler’s Notebook Watercolor paper.

Another way to use these is to put them in pigment and then draw with them until the pigment is cleared from the brush. I thought this was the best way to get large areas of color. The broader brushes seem to be made for this especially, because finer lines can be made with watercolor pencils, but I like the finer brushes in pigment for this too. In this case, the pigment I used was Himi Gouache. Gouache could be put on a brush and applied on it’s own without water, but I often leverage the watercolor-like aspects of gouache, so I gave it a try with these brush pens.

Lastly, I found these were pretty easy to clean, or they were self-cleaning. Unless there’s very aggressive pigment loading, pigment doesn’t get into the reservoir of these pens, so the water cleans out any pigment on it’s own. Instead of dipping a brush in water to clean it, if I needed a new pigment on a similar brush, i could either just dab the brush on a paper towel for a bit, or let the color run out on it’s own. I squeezed the pens to remove more of any color that was still on the brush. Despite what I thought was pretty hard squeezing, the water didn’t run out in the pens very fast.

I think these pens would be great for plein air painting, or maybe it could be called a combination of painting and drawing. They’re lightweight, they don’t run out of water easily, and they are fun and easy to use on paper with pencils or paint. I haven’t tried it, but they’d probably also be very fun with acrylic ink or india ink.

To summarize

Chromatek Water Brush Pens are a fun and easy tool for creating watercolors from pigments or watercolor pencil linework. They can be used with gouache and ink too.

The pens have a unique unscrewing mechanism, once you get the hang of it, it is straightforward, but the first time opening them can be a bit tricky. (righty-loosy)
The pens are easy to pack and clean. The water doesn’t run out quickly.