Hillclimb Couch (and Posca Tip)

 

8/9/23 Maple Leaf neighborhood

All of my walking routes to and from Green Lake require a steep hill. Also unavoidable is crossing over Interstate 5, a brief but noisy and unpleasant segment. On this morning, however, I was rewarded with an urban couch on this particularly unattractive, uphill stretch. It’s been a slow season for urban couches, so I take what I can get.

Posca tip: You may recall that I have a love/hate relationship with Posca paint markers. I’m currently enjoying a hot honeymoon phase as I explore exciting ways to use these colorful, opaque markers with equally colorful Uglybooks – and not just as the “white” highlights. The honeymoon has been made possible with a useful discovery:

One of the Posca’s worst habits is that if it hasn’t been used even for a brief time, the paint seems to separate, and even after vigorous shaking, what comes out initially is a diluted, semi-transparent liquid. More shaking, priming and sometimes messy blobbing are necessary to get the paint flowing properly. However, I’ve discovered that if I store the pen cap-end down in my bag, it requires very little shaking and no priming at all.

Bird's eye view of my bag -- all implements upright. The only downside
of storing the Posca this way is that I can't see the colored cap, but that's
not an issue if I carry only one color at a time.

I know that some markers (Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens, for example) are supposed to be stored horizontally to prevent gravity from pulling the ink away from the tip, and perhaps that’s the case with Posca pens, too. That’s not tenable in my bag, however, where all implements are stored vertically for easy, visible access. As long as there’s no issue with excess paint flowing to the tip, carrying the Posca cap-end down resolves a major flaw.

I’ll certainly let you know if the honeymoon ends abruptly one day (with an explosion of paint when I pull the cap off).