Jane Davenport Mermaid Markers Review

The Jane Davenport Mermaid Markers are water brush markers (ink filled brush pens) that have been filled with dye based inks that make it easy to use incorporate these beautiful ink colors into your mixed media projects.  I love working with brush pens and have purchased them in the past to fill with my favorite inks before.  I found that the price point on these markers of $39.99 at Michaels was quite reasonable.  Since I had a 40% off coupon when I purchased mine, this really lowered the price significantly.

One of the things that I first removed the Mermaid Markers from the packaging,

I notice there was a green stopper between the barrel and the ink reservoir.

First I removed the screw on lid. Then I removed the brush marker barrel from the ink reservoir.  I then removed the yellow green ring from the reservoir and carefully screwed all the pieces back together.

If you look at the clear plastic ink reservoir, you will notice a slightly indented area that has the words "push" in raised letters.

I pushed on the two sides of the plastic ink reservoir to release the ink.  That was not a good idea because as I squeezed over a scratch piece of paper, the mermaid makers squirted quite a bit of ink. The red was the biggest culprit, as the ink flows out quite easily from that brush marker.  The green below squirted a lot less ink.

It got all over my hands too.  I tried using a baby wipe to remove it but it only took a little bit of it off.  This makes me think that the ink will hold up well while using in my projects since it dried on my hand so quickly.

I figured out the right amount of pressure needed to squeeze the plastic so that ink would travel down the barrel and onto the brush part.  After that, I did not have any more problems with the ink squirting out in large amounts.

NOTE: I recommend storing these with the brush upright (brush at the top and ink reservoir at the bottom) to avoid any future leakage.  I store all my water brushes this way and have not had any problems with them.

I decided to do a couple of swatches on a variety of papers to see how the Jane Davenport Mermaid Markers would perform.  The first swatch is on Canson Cold Pressed Watercolor paper (140 lb).

The second Swatch is on the JD Marker Paper (this was from one of the butterfly refills) which is really smooth and the colors just goes onto it so beautifully.

The third swatch is on in my Hobonichi Weeks (Tomoe River paper) to see how the colors looked and if I had much bleed to the other side.

Tomoe River paper is ultra thin so I have to be careful what products I use in it.  I was so glad to see there was very little ghosting and no bleed through with these markers. Here is the back side of that page.  The yellow you see is my using a marker to highlight the dates on the page.

I also decided to do a simple swatch to see how the colors blended with each other.  The first swatch is on on Canson Cold Pressed Watercolor paper (140 lb).

The second is on Strathmore Mixed Media (90 lb) paper.

I got better results with the Canson than I did with the Strathmore paper, however the differences were quite minor.

The third swatch is on the Jane Davenport Marker Paper which is so smooth and really shows the beautiful pigments of these markers.

The last is a test of my adding water to the Jane Davenport Mermaid Brush marker swatches to see if I can get a nice watercolor affect.  I really like how easy these mixed with the smallest amount of water to get a nice effect.  The more water I added the lighter the pigment.

Mermaid Brush Pen ink mixed with water.

The regular price point is still pretty good when you consider the quality of the plastic water brush markers and the very pigmented inks that each pen has.  I did check Jane Davenport's Website and the Michaels website to see if there was any information on how light fast the inks are.  However I could not find any information regarding pigment or on how light fast each ink is for the Mermaid Markers Brush pen ink set.  The packaging did have the California Warning that states that this product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth-defects or other reproductive harm.  So I will show the usual care whenever I do use these markers.







SaveSave