- Katie Smith
3 Ways to Use the Tombow XL Blending Palette
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Today I wanted to do a little product feature of Tombow’s new XL Blending Palette and show you some of the ways that you can use it! The concept of the blending palette isn’t a new one, they’ve been selling their original Blending Palette for quite a while, but they’ve just come out with this new size and I love it.
The XL Blending Palette is an 8×10″ sturdy laminated card with a nice white surface (to see and blend inks) on one side, with a Dual Brush Pen color chart and blending tips printed onto the back.
Let’s see a few ways to use the XL Blending Palette:
Technique 1: Blending the Colors.
This was one of my favorite things about the smaller Blending Palette, and the XL Blending Palette just gives me even more room to play around with this technique.
Here’s how to blend the markers and get some ombre style lettering:
1: Apply a darker color of ink to the Blending Palette.
2: Pink up the dark ink with a lighter color marker, make sure you’ve pretty well covered the lighter tip in the darker ink.
3: Letter onto your paper with the lighter marker. As you write, the darker ink will wear off, and your marker will go back to it’s original ink color.
The Dual Brush Pens are self cleaning, so all you have to do is write with them, or scribble on a piece of paper and they go back to normal. This technique won’t hurt any of them. 🙂
Technique #2: Watercolor Drips.
While not actually watercolors, the Dual Brush Pens are water reactive, so they can act similar to watercolors and can be used for many of the same types of projects as you would the paint.
For this technique you’ll need the XL Blending Palette, a Dual Brush Pen, a misting bottle with water and a journal.
1: Apply a generous amount of Dual Brush Pen ink to the top third of the XL Blending Palette by scribbling it on.
2: Mist with water, and tilt the blending palette so that the ink runs down toward the bottom a little.
3: Lay flat again and lay your journal face down on top of the blending palette. Press down to transfer the ink and then lift up.
4: Let dry.
A post shared by Katie Smith (@studio.katie) on Jul 25, 2018 at 7:48am PDT
As you can see below, I didn’t have any ghosting/bleeding through to the next pages of my journal. You want to make sure you don’t use TOO much water or they could ghost through, but the pages in my Archer and Olive notebook are very thick so I didn’t have that problem.
Technique 3: Mixed Media!
The XL Blending Palette is so handy for mixing mediums on! Here I’m using Dual Brush Pen ink to color Modeling Paste.
1: Scribble the Dual Brush Pen ink onto the blending palette.
2. Use a spatula to mix a little bit of modeling paste into the ink.
3. Use the spatula to apply your new colored medium through a stencil (or however you want to use the modeling paste!) onto your art journal page!
4. Remove the stencil, and wash the stencil, spatula & blending palette.
So there you have 3 fun techniques you can use with the Blending Palette, but those aren’t the only 3. Feel free to experiment and play with the palette to see what you can do!
Here are a few more projects I’ve used the Blending Palette on:
You can find the XL Blending Palette available for purchase here.