I thought I made a brand new discovery but it turns out that it's been a known fact for a few years but I just never knew about it. Oh well, it works brilliantly and I hope this is a first for you! I used an Erasable Gel Pen to do my simple drawings, then coloured them using various watercolour products (Karin Markers, Boku Undo Shadow Mei watercolour paints, Distress Watercolour Pencils and some cheap student quality paints from Amazon). Once the colouring has been done, it is as simple as using a heat gun on your painting and the heat from it will erase the lines. How I worked out that it would work (and thought I discovered this new trick that no one knew about), the description of the pens was that the friction of using the eraser on the end of the pen created heat which erased the lines. So I wondered if my heat gun would do the same, it did and it worked perfectly. I have used my Pentel DX 0.28 Black Gel Pen to roughly define some of the images too. I've added some of the drawn pictures below so you can see the before and after and a little video that hopefully shows the drawn lines disappearing.
"The gate"
This is how the sheep above started out.
Just a circle-ish shape drawn with the
erasable pen and some grey colour from
my Karin Watercolour Brush Markers.
The grey has been blended with water and black
blobby heads, ears and legs have been added.
The sky and grass have been added.
A white gel pen was used for the eyes and then the
heat gun was used to erase the drawn purple
lines from the sheep. A few squiggles have
also been drawn on the sheep using grey Micron pens.
"Cactus"
After colouring the shape, the background was
added. This one was painted using just student-grade
cheap paints from Amazon.
This video shows the drawn purple line around the
cactus being erased with a heat gun.
"Live your story"
(To colour this piece, I used the set of Boku Undo Shadow
Watercolour Paints. These are a very dark and moody set
of highly pigmented E-Sumi watercolours.)
"Break"
You can see you don't need to be a skilled
artist to do this technique! I really like the
simplistic style.
"A dot going for a walk"
(This one was coloured with the Distress Watercolour
pencils by Ranger.)
All of the purple line is the drawing just before
erasing with the heat gun. It makes it easier
to see what image you are trying to create
with the drawn line rather than just winging it.
This is the alternative, just painting some blobby
shapes. A visual of the end product helps me.
A simple line drawing.
"Focus"
(I love how this one turned out!)
Another very simple drawing that can help
with your painting before using some
fine black gel pen to roughly outline your lines.
