Gold Ink Pens: Pentouch vs Posca vs Decocolor

As an artist who mainly uses ink in my pieces I am always on the hunt for the best inks, pens, and illustration tools. While I have been recovering from an injury, I haven’t been able to draw at all. Now that I am feeling better, I have had a bit of time to continue my search.

I have always had a soft spot for metallics but have never found myself using them that often. This changed when I decided to experiment with an some of my gold pens and found some differences in their pen nib performance and visual appearance as pertains to their ink.

I will preface this by saying I am not affiliated with any of these companies and I believe each of them has their positives and places for different uses.

The three attributes I will focus on in this post are: precision, ink appearance and metallic vibrancy.

First up on the list is Pen-Touch by Sakura. Sakura products have always had a special place in my heart, I go through at least five black micron pens a month and have never found another product that can compete.

The issue I ran into with the gold Pen-Touch pens was precision.

I rely on fine tipped pens to help me create fine lines. I was unable to get the crispness and achieve control of the ink when working in smaller areas. The ink appearance was overall pretty good but I would have liked it to be a teensy bit more vibrant and opaquer.  

Posca markers are another favorite of mine. It’s like carrying around little acrylic paint pallets that don’t require any clean up! Precision wise these fine tipped markers were absolutely my favorite to work with.

I was able to achieve the tiniest bit of details and fit LOTS of lines into the space because of it.

My issue with this particular color was the metallic vibrancy and ink opaqueness. I was able to see right through it to the black ink background and couldn’t achieve that metallic visual I got from the Sakura brand pen.

DecoColor isn’t a brand I have used often but this little pen surprised me, while its precision was right in between the other two pens, it’s ink and gold vibrancy were incredible.

It shone in the light and was completely opaque. I couldn’t see the black through the marks.

Overall, these are my ratings (out of 5) for each of the pens:

At the end of the day I think I will be using these pens for different things but the search is still on for the perfect fine line metallic ink pen!