Playing with Paintmarkers

Quite some time ago I had ordered a set of Acrylic Paint pens from Amazon. Unfortunately I hadn't done anything with them since then. In the beginning of October I felt that I would like to try to do something with them (this was before I watched a video about what to do when their tips dry up). I went through them, priming them by pumping a lot. Some of them were dried up. No matter how much I pumped - no ink was coming through the tip. I thought that they were not usable any more and threw them away.

Then I watched this video where a guy told me how to reactivitate dried up acrylic markers. I removed some of the tips and let them soak. I exchanged two tips. And alas - I got all of these paint pens to work again!

The next thing was the paper I chose: I finally focussed on these papers:

• Bristol paper
• Stone paper
• cardboard
• coated paper

Stone paper and coated paper are very, very smooth. The tip glides beautifully over the paper. There is one disadvantage: As the ink does not suck into the paper, it takes some time until it is dry. Be careful not to touch the painting too early, it will smear. Bristol paper and cardboard are a less smooth, but also usable.

I rediscovered PicFinder AI

PicFinder AI was among the first AI Art generators I have been using. But with Nightcafe Studio, Ideogram AI and Mage Space I neglected it because most of the results I got weren't very satisfying. However now, almost one year later, I rediscovered PicFinder again. I found out something very important: PicFinder works best with longer prompts. What I am doing now is to go to Ideogram or Nightcafe Studio and look for one of my images there and then copy the magic prompt:

Here is the prompt:

A photo of an indoor jungle with a variety of tropical plants. There are large plants with big leaves, like palms and ferns. There are also smaller plants with colorful flowers. The plants are placed in pots of different sizes and shapes. The pots are arranged on wooden shelves, crates, and the ground. The background is a white wall with a few holes.

And here are two of the results. PicFinder offers you quite a lot of images, in square format, or landscape or portrait format.

The only disadvantage I see is that the free version of PicFinder only allows personal use. I do journaling, and I love to use stickers in my journal. PicFinder will work absolutely great here!

Acrylic inks and paintmarkers

A long time ago I ordered a set of acrylic paintmarkers from Amazon. In addition to that I've got some Molotow paintmarkers and a black Posca pen. I have to admit that I didn't use them a lot, and then, a few days ago I noticed that some of them had dried up. However I watched a video which taught me that it could help to exchange the tips. And yes, it did. So I decided to use them in addition to my acrylic inks to do some detail painting and drawing.