Tent in the Storm

I used three colours for this painting: magenta, black and lemon yellow. I changed between using the paint / ink as it came out of the bottle and adding water to it. In the beginning I had some geometric shapes, and then while working on the painting something like a tent in the storm emerged. I learnt that adding yellow to magenta makes a very strong red, and that it takes a lot of yellow to turn it into something slightly orange!

Blue Violet

First there was the blue violet and the two leaves. I did the sketch, transfered it via transparent paper and my window pane onto the watercolour paper and blocked the colour in. I tried to get a nice violet mix by adding some drops of magenta to my cyan blue, but, as you can see, the amount of red is still too little.

For the loose landscape I diluted the permanent green with some drops of water, wetted the paper a bit and let the paint flow in. Same with the sky. I then added some strokes with polychromos coloured pencils in the middle. 

After having done all this I took a step back and wasn't totally satisfied with the result. Would some ink lines help? Or would they destroy the whole painting? I took a scan of the painting as it was and then proceeded with applying some loose inkstrokes.Well, I felt better after that...

Rainbow Rectangles

I did these colourful rectangles with my new acrylic inks, using cyan. lemon yellow, and magenta. Besides playing with various geometric shapes I tried to practice colour mixing and adding ink lines with my staedtler pigment liner.

The green patches which you can see are not painted with a green but created by putting yellow on blue.

The Mystery in the Jungle

This painting is the result of colour mixing experiments - this time, as you may guess, lemon yellow with cyan. I made the mistake of dropping the cyan into the yellow - should have done it the other way! It needs a lot of yellow to get green with the cyan. At the very end I added some red spots with an alholobased marker.

Fire and Ice

This is the second painting I did with the acrylic inks. Here I mixed magenta and cyan. The big advantage of those acrylic inks is that you can layer them - not only in an opaque way but also diluting the paint as you do with "normal" acrylics when you do a glaze. 

While I was doing this I more and more had a certain picture in front of my eyes - hot lava flowing down an icey and stoney mountain.

A new Adventure: Acrylic ink

I have been wanting to try them for quite some time. But there's always been the thought: "You've got so many art materials, you don't need those acrylic inks!" So I focussed my curiosity on all the videos on YouTube. But when Easter was coming I decided to allow myself an Easter gift - four acrylic ink bottles from Lucas. I selected cyan, magenta, lemon yellow and black. They would give me the chance to mix quite a range of colours. I bought them and carried them home.

I don't know why but it took two days for me to open two of the bottles and try them out. I really had been afraid to do something terribly wrong with them. But then I overcame my angst and did the piece you can see above. It is a simple geometrical shape which provided me however with the opportunity to test those inks, especially the colour range you get when you add more water to them. I find it fascinating how many shades of blue I got out of one drop of cyan!

Golden panes - Acrylics again

I always thought that Acrylics and me would never become friends. A long time ago I bought a Daler-Rowney System 3 set and gave it away half a year later. One year later I bought a very cheap acrylics set of no-name paints and tried again. Well, it went a bit better but I was having far more fun with other mediums.

This time I tried again - and to my surprise, I was having a bit of fun. I had the feeling that with some practice I could even have more fun. Here I used them together with my colorex liquid watercolours: Whereas the panes are acrylics all the rest is colorex.