Gelly Roll and Wash

Pen and wash is a favorite medium of mine—it’s a great way to do landscape sketches quickly yet introduce a bit of color with some watercolor washes. And watercolor field kits that contain a set of small pans of paint are readily available and work well on outdoor sketching expeditions. One issue though is the choice of pen. Dip-nib pens are great in the studio but porting around bottles of ink is a risky thing to do in a backpack. Fountain pens are somewhat more portable, but generally too precious for the field, and fountain pen inks aren’t waterproof, a desirable quality if one is going to paint washes over the ink drawing. I have often used Sakura Micron Pigma pens, which are pigment-based archival-quality felt-tip pens, but these have a harsh feel to them.

Anyway, I can’t believe it has taken me so very long to discover Gelly Roll pens, also made by Sakura. They are roller-ball gel pens, and it turns out they are both archival and waterproof. Moreover, they are cheap and are available almost everywhere. Above is my first Gelly Roll and wash landscape, looking west towards the Putah Creek gap in the Vaca Mountains.