Watercolor inks

Some people call them "inks", some people speak of "liquid watercolors" . The most common brands are "Ecoline" made by Royal Talens and "Colorex" made by Pebeo. Both brands are made with dyes and therefore not lightfast. 

Both brands come in small bottles of either 30 or 48 ml. The bottles now have droppers, which makes application easy. I had bought a small selection of Colorex colors more than five years ago and added two bottles in the meantime. I also have a few ecoline colors - fir green, forest green, siena, warm grey and indigo.

Last week I felt like switching to this medium again. As with all liquid mediums color mixing is not that easy. The Ecoline forest green is a real green green - which in my opinion is a bit too much. But add a drop of warm grey, or siena, or chartreuse and it changes to wonderful quite natural greens!

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. 

 

Abstract painting done with Acrylic ink

Well, it's acrylic ink again! This time I did a pencil drawing first and then inked the drawing, and only then filled in the colors. It is a bit of a new procedure for me - I have been applying the colors rather spontaneously without thinking about the composition first. I think that I stick to this new way of painting. 

By the way I also also used craft paint in this painting, together with acrylic inks. The paint is called "Acrylini" and made by Rico Design. It is a soft body Acrylic paint out of a tiny bottle. 

Neocolor 2 - a review

 

After painting with Neocolor 2 for some time I decided to switch to Acrylic inks again. Yes, I had a blast painting with the watersoluble wax crayons. It is so easy to get access to a broad range of colors without having to mix them, and yes, you can mix them on the paper. You do not have to spend much time with preparations - just take the crayons or the dissolved pigment of the shavings and paint. Brushes are easily cleaned.

However, there is one disadvantage: It is almost not possible to apply marks with a gel pen or an ink pen afterwards because of the waxy and chalky surface the crayons create. With acrylic ink I do not have this kind of problem. And yes, acrylic inks are more difficult to mix. You can easily have too much of the dark color (especially black) if you are not careful. But I intend to get better at that by practicing.

Mage: Same prompt, two different prompt styles

Mage is one of my favorite AI Art Generators. One of its advantages is that it offers several packs of prompt styles. 

Here I used the prompt:

a beautiful purple flower in a dark forest, in the style of hyper-realistic sculptures, dark orange and green, post-apocalyptic backdrops, light red and yellow, museum gallery dioramas, soft, dreamy scenes, orange and green, surreal 8k zbrush render

and the prompt style: "Fauvism".

I created the image on the right with the same prompt, but changed the prompt style to "rococo".

The petals of the flower and the leaves looks quite different, the colours of the petals are orange and blue, and the flower is placed in the forest. 

By the way, I took the prompt from Lexica. Once offering a free account, Lexica now has to be paid if you want to create images. But you can still search for images and the respective prompts for free.