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Tuesday quick tip: how to avoid pen bleed at the end of a sketching job

August 4, 2020 By Cindy Eckhoff Leave a Comment

I love using the sketch pens and especially my own pen in the pen holder. But there’s one thing I absolutely feel the opposite about. When the machine gets to the end of a sketch job, it briefly holds the pen down at the end of the shape. That causes a heavier bit there — a bit of a bleed. This is especially true with markers of any type. Don’t worry — there’s an easy solution.

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Stop the bleeding!

Unfortunately, you can’t reengineer the machine or software or firmware or whatever makes this happen. But you can do a quick workaround.

After you’ve finished designing your entire project, draw a small shape such as a 1/4″ square somewhere that it won’t matter. Because you added that last, the machine draws it last. It works even better if you make it a compound path. If you’re sketching with multiple colors of pens and sending the job by line color, make a separate shape for each line color.

The pen bleed happens on that extra shape rather than on your good stuff. Here’s an example from a quilt label I did recently:

quilt label

See that little black square below my red outline? That’s my extra shape. Here’s what that looks like when I sketch it with a Sharpie fine line (paid link) marker:

stop sketch pen bleed

The red arrow and gray box aren’t on the label — I’ve just added those on the photo for privacy and to help you see where I added the extra shape. If you want to learn more about how I made the actual label, including the designs and fonts I used, see the full post here.

That bleed wouldn’t have looked lovely on the actual quilt label. Quick tip for the win!

Filed Under: Tips, Tools and Accessories Tagged With: pen, Sketch

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