Sharpie Stained Brush Pen Review for Hand Lettering

Sharpie Stained Brush Pens are by far one of my favorite brush pens. Which is funny because they’re originally not meant for hand lettering or calligraphy, but I would disagree! They are great for both beginners and pros in hand lettering. This video shows you why!

This brush pen is a great in between size, in my opinion. It’s a super juicy and bouncy brush pen and part of that reason is because it’s actually a fabric marker. This brush pen was created to write or color on fabric and you can see on the inside of the pen that there’s liquid inside of the pen.

I also compared it with a Tombow Dual Brush Pen since that’s a familiar one that will hopefully be a good comparison for many of you. I don’t think that the Sharpie Stained is much like a Tombow, this is just for size comparison purposes.

One of the reasons that I love the Sharpie Stained is because in my experience, it lasts so long! Now, I’m not a Sharpie expert, but I’m going to guess that one of the reasons why the tip of this brush pen is so long lasting is because of the pen being created for fabric. If you’re going to color on a t-shirt then you need a brush tip that’s not going to fall apart on you, and this thing is sturdy!

It’s super bouncy, but it takes a lot for it to fray. In fact, I’m not sure that I’ve ever had a sharpie stained brush pen fray on me before but I have had one run out of ink and that’s saying a lot! Sometimes people ask me why i don’t always store my brush pens horizontally, and my response is usually something like… well, usually my brush pens fray long before the ink ever runs dry so I just haven’t worried about that.  I push down pretty hard when I’m lettering with this brush pen and you can see that it’s still bouncing right back up with some very thin upstrokes.

But not with these! They have a lot of ink coming out of them, they’re super bouncy and they last a long time! That combination can be hard to find all in one brush pen.

But they’re not perfect… so let me tell you some of the downsides.

First of all, they take a long time to dry! This doesn’t bother me because I’m right handed, but you lefties may be waiting a long time in between letters because these are very juicy. Again, I’m sure that’s because these were intended to be fabric markers so you need a lot of ink on them. But regardless it’s something to mention because I don’t want to gloss over the negatives just because I love these things so much.

The other thing that’s a downside to me is the colors. I would love a big variety of colors, but i’d even be super excited about a pack of black pens. But currently i’m only available to find these in a pack with some primary colors. Within those colors, there are a couple that are almost a neon highlighter type of color, which isn’t great for most hand lettering because it can be hard to read. Honestly, that orange and pink are almost hard to even look at because they’re so bright!

I’m sure this is super fun when making t-shirts though, so it’s not a negative to the marker! I would just LOVE to see them come out with some more colors or offer just the black option. 

So with the blending tests, you’ll see a bit of blending, but not much. It is more of a streaky look. That being said, these markers are pretty juicy so if you wanted to go back and add some color to them, you probably could although I didn’t test that for this video.

The water test shows that they are pretty water resistant. The red and blue don’t look quite perfect, but when I did the red I think my water brush had a bit of black on it still and when I did the blue, it was still a bit wet so I’m sure that’s the reason for the bit of color you see. Otherwise, they all held up really well.

Overall I think it’s clear that I really do love these brush pens. If you’d like to watch more pen reviews check them out here, join the Pen a Day Lettering Challenge or find some practice worksheets here if you’re wanting to learn more about hand lettering.