Two Colours Challenge

By subscribing to the newsletter of Dover publications I have access to free samples of colouring pages. I had printed this one out quite some time ago on copy paper planning to colour it in with my watercolour pencils.

However in the meantime I got hooked on my new liquid watercolours - colorex from Pebeo and Ecoline from Royal Talens. I had used them on watercolour paper only. Well, there's always a "first time", so I unscrewed two bottles: the magenta bottle  and the cyan bottle and put a little drop of both of the colours onto my palette. I had the goal to only use these two and was rather excited how many colours you can mix with them!

Blue Snail Shell

I love my liquid watercolours. I began with a starter set of the colorex brand, but then I discovered ecoline, a lqiuid watercolour made by Royal Talens, a company in the Netherlands. Ecolines doesn't come in round bottles - they are square and resemble inkwells. I bought a bottle with ultramarine dark watercolour ink (it is not real ink but the name "ink" is used quite often).

Of course I had to try it out. I seldom buy something new and do not give it a try on the same day. In this painting i mixed the magenta from colorex with the ultramarine from Ecoline. I must say that mixing colours is not easy with those liquid watercolours - I don't always get the colour I want to have. But I give myself the permission to experiment!

Bird with Roses

Another colouring page I found on Pinterest. Here I used my watercolour pencils together with my Stabilo68 pens which can be activitated with water as well as the watercolour pencils.

Pink Explosion

I did it today - I bought a starter set of colorex watercolour inks and painted this abstract painting with it. 

Colorex paints come in little bottles, together with three eye-droppers, These are used to get the paint out of the bottle and onto your palette. Depending on how intense you want the colours to be you add a bit of water. You can also mix the colours by taking a wee bit of ink with your brush and put it on some other paint in the palette or by directly dropping one paint on the other. 

In this case here I used magenta and cyan, different amounts of water, and mixed them one time taking more magenta and the other time taking more cyan.

It is really an adventure, but a very enjoyable one. I love experiments!

Colourful Dragonfly

I found the lines for this dragonfly on an internet website with free colouring pages. This time I inserted a sheet of drawing cardboard into my printer, being a bit anxious because I was not sure whether it would take it or not. It did! It is not a super heavy drawing cardboard but it was strong enough not to buckle during the process of activitating the watercolour pencils.

I am quite satisfied with the result, but there's one thing I find disturbing: the patch of dark blue on the back of the dragonfly. I think it is too much of a contrast. 

Green Houses

This scene is painted with watercolourpencils on acrylic paper. I just wanted to see whether this strange combination would work - and yes, it did because I applied the pencils' wet tips on the paper. Of course this method is eating up the pencils in a very quick way - which I didn't so much care about because I used the less expensive Mondeluz pencils from Koh-i-Noor, a Czech company. 

The Rose Fairies

This time I used my watercolour pencils first dry on paper and then activated them with a damp q-tip. The colours are not so strong as when I touched the water drop with my pencil, but the colouring looks smoother this way.

What I still find difficult with watercolour pencils is that you really have to do a kind of colour chart with the activated colours - there is such a difference between the colours of the dry watercolour pencils and the activated ones!