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.

Green Vines

This time I wanted to do a monochromatic abstract painting with my colorex paints, and as I had opened the bottle with the green hue a short time ago I went for green. I added some yellow for the lighter greens, and some black and blue for the darker ones. 

It was fun doing it and I am pleased to see what can be done with a limited palette. 

The only sad thing however is that the colorex paints are not lightfast at all. They are not based on pigments but on dye. In this aspect they behave like markers do - and the good thing is that I've got a marker painting which I put framed behind glass and I have it for over three years now and cannot see any change in the colours. Of course I would never sell it.

Ring of Stones

I opened another one of my new colorex liquid watercolour bottles - the green one. It is a very vivid green, especially if you add yellow to it as I did here. For the red-orange stones I went to the palette with my leftover Neocolor II paints, created from the shavings of the watersoluble crayons. As you can see you can work with different watermedia in one painting! 

Troll

This troll is a variation of the pink monster. It has got clothes, and a head, but otherwise the pose is almost the same. However a new colour is used - I opened the colorex bottle with yellow in it and mixed it with magenta. I got a nice vibrant red this way. 

And I tried another thing - producing a kind of liquid gouache: I took a tiny piece of indian red out of the tube into a small container and added drops of water to it, mixing it, so that I got a kind of liquid gouache. Then I grabbed one of my brushes and applied the liquid gouache on top of the yellow red stones. It worked like a glaze. Interesting!

Pink-blue Diamond

I painted this diamond with two colours: ultramarine dark from Ecolline (Royal Talens) and cyan from colorex. I used two brushes - a waterbrush to put the paint on and a watercolour brush to wet the paint. 

Once again I was fascinated by the intensitiy of the liquid watercolours - the ultramarine I took out of the lid of the bottle after I'd given it a bit of a shake, and the cyan was still on my palette from the day before. 

The only thing that I found a bit difficult was to take the proper brush which means only using the waterbrush for putting on the paint and only using the ordinary watercolour brush for wetting the paper and the paint. 

Little Pink Monster

Just now I am working on adding small changes to my drawings. This one here was first traced from the blue monster which I did in December last year and then recreated, traced again and then I transfered the drawing to my watercolour paper. I coloured it in with my new colorex paints which I am still enjoying very much!

Orange koifish

At the moment I am focussing on two things:

1. I am still experimenting with mixing my colorex liquid watercolours. I know that many people recommend doing those colour charts with rectangles. I try to do my colour charts the other way: I am using my own drawings, trace them again and then colour it trying new mixes. Of course this is not as "scientifc" as doing those charts with rectangles, but I am having more fun doing it my way. In this case I used magenta mixed with mars orange mixed with sepia. 
2. I am experimenting with changing my drawings a tiny bit. I trace my drawings and then change the shape of the fins, or the directions of the fins, or whatever comes to my mind. In this case I changed the shape of the left fin a bit. Then, when I am satisfied with the new drawing on my tracing paper, I put up my provisional light table and transfer the "new" drawing on my proper paper - in this case drawing cardboard.

Exit to nowwhere

In the beginning of the painting process (I used my colorex liquid watercolours again) I hadn't any particular scene in mind - I just wanted to find out what would  happen if I add black to magenta. Depending on the amount of black and magenta you can get beautiful shades of violet. 

When the painting was finished and I was looking at it I more and more had the impression of a cave with stone pillars. The cave is getting narrower and narrower, and there is a dark hole at the end of the cave which might lead to an exit to the surface, or to an exit to nowhere. 

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!