bloowabbit: Indian ink

Friday, 12 August 2016

Night Sky Maidens

Was in my local Works outlet looking at their arts/craft section. This is where I'd bought the cheap acrylic paints which weren't that great pigment-wise. But if you're wanting to try out a type of paint it's a good place to start before investing much more money in quality materials.

I saw this little packet of wooden stars and thought they'd be useful for some sort of craft idea coming up to Christmas.

What I did with them was draw first with pencil and then tint with Letraset flex markers. Wood is easy enough to draw on with pencil but, as I expected, the markers colours bled quite quickly along the grain. With each new star I used the markers less heavily and that seemed to help prevent excessive bleeding.

The night sky background was done with an Ultramarine Faber-Castell Indian ink pen which bled far less and worked well on the wood. The edges and back of each wooden star was coloured dark blue with a Chafford alcohol marker.

These little stars are made of untreated wood and I feel that a wooden block designed and made specifically for painting would work a lot better. I'm not sure what I'll use these for. perhaps they're go into a curio box.

Links:

The Works website

Prismacolor on wood - Bryan Collins (fabulous work)

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bloowabbit DeviantArt page

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Wednesday, 27 July 2016

Indian Ink brush pens

I had wanted to try out a few different products from my local art shop and saw these Faber-Castell PITT artist pens which are available in a choice of 2 barrel sizes and different nib sizes - I chose the small barrel size with broad nibs. Their colours are bright and vibrant as they are Indian ink based. They don't blend but they can be layered on top of one another to create rich vivid tones and are waterproof.

Using the wooden model I manipulated the figure into the pose I had in my mind's eye. I then drew it in pencil. This would be the basis of the finished figure.

After taking photographs of my own hands in these positions I sketched more detail.

please feel free to download

this ink drawing to colour

Inked up with a UniPin fineliner and erased the pencil lines. It was at this point I thought having used a coloured pencil to 'ink' might have been better, as the colour would merge better into the FC colours. Emanating from the figure's arms and hands were moths and across the back of the figure was a broad band of flowers, drawn from photographs online.

Copics in Light Hydrangea and Phthalo Blue coloured the figure and some of the flowers. I added Promarker in Amethyst and Letraset flex marker in Sorbet. For the heart-shaped moths I laid down PITT pens in Crimson and Carmine and found that I could move the ink around somewhat with an overlay of copic if I worked quickly enough. Wings were feathered in all three Indian ink colours including Ultramarine.

The mottled background was done with Letraset flex markers in Sorbet, Pale Pink and Dolphin Blue. I bought about 20+ of these markers at £1 each from my local art shop as they're getting rid of their stock. I've been told that Windsor and Newton, who've taken over Letraset, still do a Brushmarker but some artists feel the ink is not the same quality as the Letraset range was.

'Moth Guardian'

I outlined the figure in the Ultramarine PITT pen, the flowers in Crimson and the tiny moth hearts in Carmine. I omitted creating shadows as I liked the glowing effect the 2 Copics gave the figure. A final outlining and highlights of white gel pen finished the piece.

This was intended to be another in the 'Mother of' series but the figure looks more amorphous than feminine. The PITT pens were unusual to use and I'd like to try a wider range of colours. There is a good range of colours including neons and a gold but there isn't an Indian ink soluble blender available (I don't know if such a thing is possible). The method of using the pens is very different from using Copics or other alcohol markers.

Links:

Faber-Castell website

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