Tag: highlighter

Stabilo Boss NatureCOLORS Review – Can Highlighers Be Used for Sketching

Stabilo make THE highlighters – Stabilo Boss – chunky, reliable, classic. Over the years they’ve added pastel colours to their original neon coloured highlighters, and just recently they’ve expanded their pastel highlighter lineup to include the NatureCOLORS. The NatureCOLORS lineup can be bought separately, or in a wallet of all 6 new colours, or a wallet of 8 that includes two black “marker” pen. The 6 new colours are Warm Grey, Earth Green, Mud Green, Beige, Umber and Sienna. The black “marker” is just an opaque black “highlighter”.

From top to bottom, black marker, warm grey, mud green, earth green.

I first saw these in a bookstore in Paris, and while I hardly ever use highlighters, the black marker and the natural tone of the other highlighters made me buy four of them to try out while sketching. As usual with Stabilo, there’s no indication on the pen body what colour it is beyond the colour of the pen body and a number that you have to look up on their site.

Testing the pens out

I used these pens for quick landscape thumbnails and sketches, and they work pretty well with a few caveats:

  1. They bleed through everything but the thickest paper.
  2. They spread on almost every paper.
  3. They aren’t archival (so they will fade and discolour with time)
  4. They are chunky, which means they aren’t the most portable of pens (even though they’re light)
  5. They can be awkward to hold and manipulate at times.
Bleedthrough

They’re also not at all built for layering and mixing, which means that trying to create layers with them will just leave you with a soggy paper mess:

They don’t layer well, as evidenced by the grassy hill in this sketch.

So what are they good for? They work well for quick impression sketches, particularly of buildings, where you can get shading and shadows down very quickly. I used them on an architecture walk to get an impression of the buildings and they worked very well.

What they’re good at – blocking the windows, shading the building, impression of a cloudy sky.

It’s difficult to be accurate with them, but in these sort of sketches I’m not looking for accuracy, just of an impression, a quick note of what I saw and what caught my eye. A photo is great, but it doesn’t highlight what made me stop and take a second look at a building.

They even work decently well on cream coloured paper.

Yes, copic markers could do the job, but they cost much, much more than a Stabilo Boss marker, they aren’t as readily available, and they dry out very quickly. Sometimes you need a cheap workhorse to get the job done, and for this new use I think the Stabilo Boss NatureCOLORS work just fine.

Stabilo Boss Pastel Highlighters and Notes on Highlighting

There’s something about multi-coloured sets of stationery items that I just find irresistible to the point where I bought an entire set of Stabilo Boss Pastel highlighters even though I hardly ever use highlighters.

These were on sale. It hardly justifies me buying them.

I think highlighters are one of the quintessential back to school items, as you’re likely to use them most when you’re revising or reading and taking notes for a class. I used to use highlighters extensively, in the “bad old days” when Stabilo Boss were the only decent highlighters around. They are now bested in every possible way but price (and even that depends where) by their Japanese counterparts, with their sophisticated windows, double-sided tips, brush tips and weird double line producing tips. Even when it comes to colour choice the old Stabilo Boss gets left behind.

The strange mottling you see is because these lay down so much terrible ink.

The Stabilo Boss highlighters are likely what you’ll find in the office (when you actually go there, Covid permitted). If you can get your office to purchase the pastel version of these I highly recommend it as they are less searing on the eyes than their standard fluorescent brethren. Otherwise these have a chunky pen body that’s pretty comfortable to hold, especially if you’re a kid, and truly terrible ink. It’s much too wet, and tends to bleed through practically every kind of paper that you’ll find in a normal office setting, and most of the high quality stuff too. My main use for them has been as colouring markers to give to the kids my colleagues sometimes bring to work. I draw colouring pages with a sign pen, and if the parents didn’t bring coloured pencils or markers with them, the Stabilo Boss markers do in a pinch.

Even on relatively thick Baron Fig Confidant paper these manage to bleed and show through.

As for actual highlighting, these do a terrible job. They smudge anything but ballpoint, they bleed through like terrible, and the colours are decent but not very exciting. Note that these pick up ink and retain it pretty well, which gives the classic “dirty highlighter” effect, especially on the lighter coloured ones.

Highlighter testing on Rhodia paper, which you’ll probably not have access to at work.

So if you’re looking for a highlighter, look elsewhere, there are much better choices on the market. I’m not going to even deign to test Stabilo’s claim that these still work after being left uncapped for 4 hours. It’s more important that the actual highlighter is good and useful than that it wins in a highlighter survival contest that has little to do with their standard everyday use.

Now to the notes on highlighting: on the second semester of my first year as an undergraduate I had a professor who actually took the time to teach us how to take notes and revise. He had an acerbic sense of humour and a great dislike of highlighters. “If you want to highlight something, only use a pencil, or at the most a pen, to underline it. Never use highlighters, because then when you read back your eyes will only see the highlighters, and if you’ve misunderstood something, or appropriated too much importance to a sentence or passage you have little chance to ever correct it. Underlining with something that doesn’t immediately jump out to you lets you see things in context, and reevaluate them if necessary”.

I tried his advice out and I found out that it worked well for me, and so I’ve been underlining and not highlighting ever since.

Zebra Mildliner Review and Journal Comic

I love highlighters, so long as they’re not the blindingly neon ones, as I find them distracting. So when JetPens first offered the Zebra Mildliner Double-Sided highlighters, I had to give them a try. Theoretically, like all highlighters, they are supposed to help you organize your notes. In reality they just add a little colour to my usual mess.

Highlighter pen bodies tend to be on the chunkier side, oftentimes square shaped. The Zebra Mildliners are just slightly thicker than usual pens, and very light. If for some reason you have hours of highlighting ahead of you, these ought to be pretty comfortable to use.

As their name suggests, these highlighters are double-sided. One size is a small chisel tip, and the other is an even smaller bullet tip. I had a hard time achieving coverage with the chisel tip in one go, but I’m not a stickler for these sort of things so it didn’t matter much to me. I was more interested in the Zebra Mildliner’s muted, and rather original colour palette.

This is a close up of the three Mildliner colours that I got: Mild Grey, Mild Orange and Mild Smoke Blue.  None of these colours are standard: the orange looks more like a peach than a traditional orange, the mild smoke blue looks like a muted teal or a light blue black, and I’ve never heard of a gray highlighter before. It sounds like an oxymoron: grey highlighter. But here it is, and it’s pretty cool (no pun intended, plus it’s a warm grey anyway).

Apart from having fun with these in the journal comic above, I tried these on a variety of pens and inks. I’ve been using these highlighters for over six months now, but I don’t highlight over anything but gel pens normally. As expected, these behaved the best with fineliners (see the comics above) and with ballpoint pen. This being Clairefontaine paper may have made the Uniball Signo gel refill drying times long enough for the highlighter to smudge the text a bit even after a full minute. The Ohto Flash Dry is just a miracle refill, but the Noodler’s Lexington Grey just floored me. I never expected to see a fountain pen ink stand up to highlighter so well, so quickly, especially with such a broad nib and on this paper. Phenomenal.

The Zebra Mildliner Double-Sided highlighters come in 15 colours. I don’t recommend buying them all; find yourself a “standard” colour, a “wild” colour, and another that’s your favourite. Despite what I personally may think, you can have too many highlighters.