Tag Archives: sharpie

Review: Sharpie Clear view Highlighter

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I’ve been wanting to review a highlighter with a view window tip for ages. I picked up a 2 pack of the Sharpie version during the BTSS clearance for super cheap.

The highlighter is classic neon yellow, my least favorite of the highlighter colors, but a classic shade. The ink lays down wet and even. I hate it when they squish out a blob of oozy wet ink then dry out as I lay down a line. The chisel tip is just the right size to get a line of text in an average textbook or in my pocket notebook.. the tip can be flipped to achieve a narrow line. The tip does not mush down even with a heavy hand. To test this I gave one of the highlighters to my wife and she used it as she read cases for work. Usually, I don’t like to use a highlighter after shes touched one for more than an hour. Hers was perfectly usable after several days of use.

Which brings me to another point, despite its diminutive size these things have a decent amount of longevity. My wife often burns through a highlighter or two PER week. This one lasted a week.  So there is a decent amount of ink.

The shape is flat and prevents rolling. They remind me of the Stabilo Boss highlighters in shape and size. It isn’t my favorite but it does the job well enough.

The cap is flaired and acts as a convenient pen stand so the pen doesn’t dry out in use. The pen is dry out resistant. I left it uncapped for about an hour and it was fine. This also means that if you lose the cap or toss it into your bag uncapped it’s going to make a huge mess.

The tip does allow me to see what I’m highlighting and I really do like it, though these are kinda silly. The see-through tip feels like a gimmick to me and unnecessary.  But the tip does hold up much better than other highlighter tips. It doesn’t mash or bend, and I like how usable the tip remained even after heavy use. That the tip is made of mostly plastic with a firm but smooth tip seems to make a great deal of difference of the longevity of the highlighter. Overall, I love these, but not for the see-through nature of the tip, rather for the longevity of the tip, which is a byproduct of the see-through plastic.

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Honesty, Authenticity, Truthiness and Resonance

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When I was in school everyone talked about wanting to make "honest work." The new buzzword for honest work is "authentic." We could spend days over glasses of red wine and mugs of coffee (as we did in college) talking about what this means. In the end it all boils down to, "I want to make work that resonates deeply withing myself and has deep personal meaning." End of story.

Or is it?

I think the truth of all the discussion and thinking on these topics is that essentially we're afraid of what we put on the paper/canvas/board/ or in the journal. Many of us make work and hide it away. It's why the art journal is so perfect, at the end of your art session you close the covers and never ever have to confront what you made again. Simple right? Except you're missing out on a  prime piece of the art journal process- learning from what you've put down and thus from yourself.

I think that fear is why we also buy into what the industry pumps out for us. It's far easier to follow the industry's recipe for success than to forge our own path and style.

Maybe the real question we need to ask ourselves is, "How do we move past the fear and into creating our work? How do we learn from ourselves to create work that resonates deeply?"

It's this hard work that an art journal is intended and supposed to help us explore. If you never look back at your pages and be critical of them (without gessoing over them) and learning from those pages what are you missing out on. If you focus on nothing but making pretty pretty pages I think you're missing out on a very important part of art journaling.

Here's a challenge: Go through your art journal, either the current journal you're working in or a recent one. Use a sharpie, write on the margins of a page what you'd change on that page. If you are too chicken you can use a post it note. If you get bold, draw right on top of the page with your sharpie.