New toys, part 2

I wrote last Friday about the new Zig Clear Colour Brush Markers I got recently - here's some tips about them.

Before I began, I looked at the whole raft of 48 Markers sitting in their box and wondered how to identify the colours. They're stored with the brush and almost clear cap upwards and the plastic colour 'guide' is on the other end. Useful and quite an accurate colour match, but I didn't want to have to tip all the pens out in search of particular colours.

This is my solution, quite similar to how I also marked my Pro Markers, except that I could use little round ready made sticky dots with the alcohol inks, the Zigs were too wet and meant that the 'sticky' was lost.

First of all I wanted a colour swatch - I split mine up onto two 4.25" x 5.5" pieces of TH Distress Watercolour cardstock so they'll slot into the Zig box:

Here they are, side by side. 'Scuse dreadful writing, I had a plastered up finger at the time. Hint, I was wise enough to write in pencil, and did have to rub out a couple of mistakes along the way. I kept the markers in the same 'running order as they're stored in the box' BTW. One other tip I'd offer is to leave a few spare slots as I have - for example, Loll says that the red marker blends out to a pinkish colour, so I'll likely be looking for the dark red marker at some point.

One thing you will surely spot is the load of browns and greys in the set - too many I suspect. But, it seems to often be the way that sets of markers are sort of 'padded out' and the 48 marker set did work out at great value against buying the markers separately!

At the same time as I was colouring the swatch, I also did this:

Scribbled little squares of colour, which you can see on the right. Then, using a normal office filing single hole punch I punched each colour out and popped the coloured dot on top of each pen using glue (I used Collall All Purpose glue and it worked fine, my other option would have been Glossy Accents or similar - no doubt you have your own favourites).

And this was the result - half way through, and I just plodded on and did one row at a time:

I'm sure others will already have thought of this solution but thought it worth sharing anyhow :)

So far, so great with the markers! And I now wonder what took me so long to get them of course.