Watercolor inks, watercolor pen brushes and acrylic ink

Right in the beginning of painting with watercolor inks I bought a set of colorex inks. It was at a time when Colorex ink bottles didn't yet have droppers. A pipette was needed to drop the ink into the well. 

As these inks are very intense you had to be careful to clean your pipette after having used it. Obviously I must have made a mistake then, changing the cyan into a greyish-blue liquid. 

Instead of throwing the tiny bottle away I thought of a way to use it by creating a kind of grisaille painting with it. After having let the painting dry I took my Ecoline Cyan which is a quite nice blue and painted over the grey-blueish first layer on spots which I wanted to be darker. The orange spots on the painting were done with an Ecoline brush pen.

In the end I wanted to create a dark background. I first used a black alcohol marker but for me it was not dark enough. So I grabbed a bottle of black acrylic ink. As you can see there is quite a difference between the black alcohol marker and the black acrylic ink!

 

Watercolor inks - still learning and having fun

With watercolors you don't usually use white. You add more water in order to lighten the color. As you can see in the painting on the left I tried to put that rule into practise. 

Watercolor inks are very intense; so in order to lighten the colors you have to add a lot of water. Actually I used some left over tiny spots of ink and added water to them and was surprised how much color I still could get out of the very watery result.

I also tried out working with an orange ecoline brush pen in order to add a contrast to the blue and pink shades.

I've got some of those ecoline brush pens, and they are a beautiful add on to the watercolor inks. Ecoline does not offer empty pens, but Molotow does: They offer empty Aqua Brush pens which they say can be easily filled with ecoline watercolor link. I haven't tried out this yet, but maybe I will sooner or later.

Watercolor inks abstract

A few days ago I decided to switch over to satercolor inks and treat them in the same way I have done with acrylic inks and gouache paints: I grabbed three bottles of watercolor ink (Golden ochre, dark yellow and forest green), sat down and did some mixing swatches. I used some small empty yoghurt containers to drop the inks into.

Doing the color mixing swatches I noticed how important it is to clean the brush between the mixes; watercolor ink is so intensive that you have to be very careful to clean your brush when you are putting down the second color. I first put the forest green on the paper, and then the golden ochre.

When I was done with the color mixing swatches I began to paint a "real" painting. I not only applied the experience with the color mixing process but also noticed that you can layer these inks in order to create darker shades. 

The blue background was added as the last step. In this case I didn't use an alcoholbased marker, I used a waterbased one. 

Playing with one-sentence-Prompts

 

Some prompts are very detailed and very lengthy. You have a certain scene in mind, you describe it as detailed as possible and voilà - there it is.

But I also like to play with very short, one sentence prompts.
The prompt for the image on the left is:

A strong wind is driving a maple leaf over a cobblestone street

It took two tries to get an image I liked. (I have to add that I have enough credits to use on Nightcafe Studio, so I could have tried even more with the sentence above.)

Gouache color sketch #2

I continued with my Gouache color swatches and sketches. This time I used Blue Lake from Reeves, and Magenta, with adding white for the lighter spots. 

Blue Lake from Reeves is a blue with a tint of green in it. In my opinion it creates a better contrast with Magenta because of this. 

In addiiton to that I decided to use alcohol markers for the background. In this case I chose a light apricot. 

I used very inexpensive watercolor paper. Watercolor paper has a smoother and a more textured side - I used the smoother side for the painting this time. 

Gouache color sketch

I have been doing color swatches with acrylic inks. I then decided to switch over to doing color swatches with gouache paints. Gouache was my first medium when I started my "artist career" after the death of my husband in 2007. For some reason or another I never got on very well with Gouache and soon started to do art with other mediums.

Now, almost 20 years later, I decided to give Gouache another try. I am doing color swatches and - together with each color swatch - color sketches. 

I only used three colors here: Violet blue (Akademie Gouache from Schmincke) and Magenta (Rico Artist Gouache), and White.

I experimented with different amounts of Violet blue and Magenta. I used watercolor paper as surface; when the color swatches were done I stored them in a box, together with notes about the mixing process.

Then I decided to do just a color sketch with the color selection. I not only wanted to see the mixes in a "real" painting, but also to practise painting with gouache in general: how to get the necessary amount of water in order to create a smooth, even looking painting. I am still at the very beginning of the whole "Learning-to-paint-with-gouache" - process, but I do not only learn, but also have fun!

Using the AI Image Editor of Deep Dream Generator

For quite some time I have been using Deep Dream Generator as my second AI Art generator. Nightcafe Studio is still the first I am going to, but then Deep Dream Generator comes next. One of the reasons of doing so is the fact that they have some additional tools which I find very interesting: One of them is the "AI Art Assistant" which helps you with creating an effective prompt, and the other one is "AI Image Editor". How does that tool work? I'll give you an example:

The photo on the left was taken during my vacation in California in 2016 near the Grand Canyon. It is in need of a bit of postprocessing with a photo editor, I have to admit.

However I wanted to use it as a start image in Deep Dream Generator, so I uploaded it to their website without changing anything.

I selected it then for the AI Image Editor and added a prompt: "cartoon drawing in the style of Boris Vallejo."

You can see the result of AI image editing on the right. 

I am still experimenting with the kind of prompt I am adding; up to now I focussed on the style of the painting (here: cartoon drawing) and the artist (Boris Valleyjo). However I figure that I could also change the light (sun from behind? Moonlight?).