Digital and traditional art

I did this lineart piece quite some time ago, and used it for colouring it in with copics. At the moment I am not so much into copics and markers but into painting with acrylic inks, and so I wondered whether I could use this piece for colouring with said inks. I did it, here is the result:

As you can see I only used a part of the lineart piece - the piece of watercolour paper I had was much smaller than the sheet with the lineart on. I also kind of simplified the lines. I am much better with a brush than when I was at the beginning of my painting adventures, but I am still not good enough to master tiny details.

However what I find interesting is the possibility to connect digital art and traditional art in one piece. I could even do a series with several colour combinations, thus learning more about which colours fit and which not. Very exciting!

Moving Greens

I thought about using another blogpost-title: "Moving Greens or the importance of White paint." I decided against it because it is too long, However all the greens you can see on the painting above have some white in them.
I only recently discovered the importance of adding white to paints - be it paints from the tube or paints out of the bottle. Schmincke has got a mixing cheat sheet on their website for AERO-Color acrylic inks, and almost every hue and shade has got white in it.
I remember my art lessons at school when we used white paint in order to paint snow - usually in wintertime before Christmas - or to paint pastel colours. Of course white paint can be used for such things, but that is far more you can do with this paint,
Of course you have to be careful not to use too much of it, especially when you add it with the eyedropper from the bottle onto an already existing paint on your palette. It takes some practice to get the relationship right - and I am practising, practising, practising....

Opaque watercolour paints

When I was searching for some artist tape in my cupboard I found an old box with opaque watercolour paints. I didn't know I had them actually. I had to try them out although this kind of paints reminds me of art lessons at school when I was a kid. I must say that that experience wasn't very encouraging! However I digress. In Germany this kind of paints is called "Deckfarben" which could be translated with "opaque watercolours". They are really cheap, and I was keen on trying out what could be done with them.
Well, of course they are not very richly pigmented, and I doubt whether they are lightfast or not. They are not so strong coloured as my acrylic inks or the watercolor inks. I used markers and coloured pencils to make the colours pop. It was fun painting with themm though!

Circles

No, this painting is not a watercolour painting. It has been painted with acrylic inks (a medium which is used by airbrush people, but you can apply the paint also with a brush). You can apply the ink in a wet-in-wet technique: wet the paper with one brush and then apply the colour with the other, and water it down with the first brush. You have to be quick because this medium dries quicker than you think it does. The less water you use the more opaque the paint is, and the more water you add the more translucent it gets. Because of the high pigmentation the colour is still very vivid and strong.

Landscape in Red

This time I tried painting in wet-and-wet technique. I used my colorex watercolour inks and two brushes - one for wetting the paper with clear water and smoothing out the paint and the other one for applying the paint. When the paint had dried I took one of my alcohol-based markers and added the frame and some parts of the silhouettes.

My Inks

Here you can see some of the art materials I am using: on the left is a stack of lids left over from my yoghurts. They are plastic and I use them as palettes for my acrylic paints - the inks as well as the tube paints. When too much dried paint covers the lid I simply put them into the bin. Eating yogurt is good for your bones - so with every yoghutt I eat I do something for my health and for my art activites!

Then there are my inks - first the colorex inks which I bought as a starter set together with one bottle of ecoline, and then my acrylic inks from Schmincke. These inks are mostly used for airbrushing but you can also use them with a brush.

Digital fish

Here I took one of my colorex paintings and transformed it into a digital painting. I used photoshop 7, quite an old version of photoshop but nevertheless one which does everything I want it to do.

The big advantage when painting digital is that you can really play with colours and shapes. You can work on it up the point when you are satisfied with it, erasing lines, going over it with another colour and another brush.