Purikura Decorating: Pens

It seems a lot of readers don’t live in Japan, many of you don’t have access to purikura at all, poor things! A lot of those that do, only have some older machines. So I thought I’d give you some ideas on how to make your purikura pretty using only the most basic decoration: pens!

Not all machines have pens, the unique ones you find in touristy spots only have frames. But for regular purikura even the oldest machines will have different coloured back drops and pens, even if nothing else.
You can get pretty creative with just the basics. And honestly, when I see my junior/senior high school girls purikura they usually use plain coloured back drops and write their names only!
Here’s a whole bunch of ideas! Hover over the pics for the machine names (where I can remember!)
Write your names:



If you want to get fancy, sign your names (use a thin pen)

Write where you are:



Or what you were doing/ going to do (this is why I think of purikura as a photo-diary)

(“Today was my TV debut!” I helped my friend filming Zoom In Super but was mostly cut out)

Write a phrase related to the pose.



Use song lyrics:


Decorate your cheeks:

Decorate your eyes:


TIP! The eye patch thing works if one eye is half closed when you took the picture!
For a challenge I asked two of my friends I take purikura with most often to ONLY use pens to decorate. We also decided to only use plain coloured backgrounds, as fancy backgrounds felt like cheating!
Using ICON
Signatures:

Cats, corners and aura-type sparkles:

Cheeks, sparkles, eye-related slogan:

Eye-patches, slogan, date and borders

Border with ribbon, date:

This is something I picked up from another friend, I totally ran out of time so I cheated and finished it on my iPhone:


Basically draw a shape around you in the lightest colour, and fill towards the edges, then do a bigger shape in a darker colour and a third bigger shape in the darkest colour.
Using Bijyo Cosme 3
Alternating colours and sparkles:

Slogan and dashed aura:

Slogan, cheeks and stripy background

Slogan, halos, wings and sparkles:

Hearts with lots of different types of pens:

Names and star background (my friend said to only attempt this if you have bonus time!)

The challenges were pretty fun! I’ll probably use pens more in the future because of this! Hope it gave you guys some ideas too!