Drop EVEYTHING! Inktense pencils!!!

So I've had my 24 set Inktense pencils in my possession for a while. A while being a couple of years  - I got them for some freehand drawing, not having any idea what they were or what they did. Even after I started colouring I never really used them, preferring coloured pencils and Pitt markers over water-activated media. Then I saw this awesome video where the artist (who incidentally looks TEWTALLY like deNiro and has a very entertaining style to boot), tried actual watercolours in adult colouring books, among others a book I like very much, Color Me Calm.


This book did better than exptected at taking watercolours and so I decided to try out wet media in it! Also the Mind of Watercolor teaches an important lesson: you don't need to have the fanciest stuff to make great art. He paints a wonderful image on the crappiest paper using talent, hard work and patience. Something to remember for a shopaholic such as myself!
Inktense came in handy for trying wet media in my colouring books and so I started looking for inspiration which led me to Peta Hewitt. The Queen of Inktense. The High Priestess of Inktense. I cannot even begin to explain how wicked this woman is with this medium! Just look at her speed colouring of Coverack from the Magical City book.  Super awe inspiring!

As fun as the above speed colouring is to watch, the Holy Grail of Inktense tutorials is the video below where Peta explains all about the Inktense pencils: what sets them apart from watercolour pencils (quite a lot so you want this info before starting out with them!), how to manage the fact that they are permanent as soon as you wet them, how you therefore must blend your colours before wetting the paper and so on. This video is time well spent if you want yo get started with your Inktense pencils!

Last night I started experimenting with my Inktense for real. A point made by Peta Hewitt is that painting with Inktense is much quicker than colouring with dry coloured pencils. Another great pro for me as I often get frustrated with the pace I keep going through my colouring books. I half completed this landscape which can be considered my first try with Inktense.

I'm particularly happy with how the large trees in the middle turned out. My 24 set of Inktense has a really crappy selection of greens (of course I think ALL my pencil sets have crappy selections of greens! I'm just super fussy with my greens.) so I used some different colours to shade and create the illusion of some naturally occurring greenish-y colour. Then I realized the curly bits in the bottom left were... ferns. GREEN ferns. So the ferns are really crappily coloured as I was sick of the poor green selection in my 24 set and was equally tired of trying to blend a nice fern colour.

Then I did the next page with the cloud swirls, done in 4 colours. Here I used the technique where I touch my waterbrush to the pencil and then paint in one continuous stroke so that I get a beautiful smooth gradient from dark to light as the pigment dissipates from the bristles.

And last but not least this nature pattern mandala, also with just 4 colours. The photo shows the pattern before and after adding water.

The Waterbrush

I use the Pentel waterbrushes or rather the medium size so far, and for the most part I'm really pleased with it.. There are occasions when water starts flowing from the bristles but that is quickly fixed by dabbing the brush on a bit of kitchen towel. The water in the reservoir lasts forever and the bristles stay clean at all times, I don't have to wash and wash them to get them clean. Much prefer the waterbrush to a regular watercolour brush!

Paper Buckling

As you can see even the fairly thick paper in Color me Calm gets all buckly. But it still holds up for all the water I put on it and as Peta Hewitt says, the buckling adds character to the page :)

I think the images speak for themselves so if you don't already own a set of Inktense I highly recommend you place an order now! :)
(I think I should put a disclaimer here: all the art supplies and books you see on this blog are purchased - and photographed - by me. So it's all my own shopping and my own photos, I only write about stuff I have actually tried & I'm not endorsed by any manufacturer. So if I rave about something it's because I really love it, not because they sent a free sample) :)

Enchanted Forest, Swedish edition

A while back I purchased my second Johanna Basford book, Enchanted Forest. Most Swedish bookstores only carrry the Swedish edition but I never thought this would be a problem. 

The Swedish edition is published by Pagina, the same publishing house marketing Hanna Karlzons Dagdrömmar. Dagdrömmar has ecxellent paper quality and is overall a lovely book altogether, not only illustration wise but as a physical book as well. 

Enchanted Forest however, was a huge dissapointment. My Secret Garden is from the US but published in England and printed in China. It has to this day the best paper of any of my books. I can safely use any water-based media without so much as a shadow of bleeding, and it even holds some water on my Inktense pencils without getting all wobbly. So naturally I was expecting the same quality from the Swedish edition of Enchanted forest. The photos speak for themselves... you can clearly see the designs not only from the next page but from the next spread, so 2 pages apart. There is also near-bleeding jsut from Staedtler fineliners (and I'm a light handed colorist.)

I contacted Pagina about this and they said they'd look into the matter but I haven't heard from them since. I am keeping my Swedish Enchanted Forest as a training copy of if someone wants to borrow a book to try out colouring... and for myself I ordered the English version which again has excellent paper. A shame that quality varies so much locally! 

Bleeding :(

Visible design from 2 pages over

Shutterstock books vs artist books!

When I first started purchasing colouring books I soon discovered that some publications were made up of compliations of Shutterstock images rather than displaying just one artist. In this post I am going to do a review of Shutterstock books, tell you about what to look for and avoid and also some of the pros and cons of this type of publications.

Shutterstock is a huge online stock image bank where anyone can upload their images (drawings or photographs) for sale. Shutterstock takes a large piece of the revenue and the rest is transferred to the artist. The upside is of course that you get a platform to sell your images where buyers can search based on theme or keywords. This gives a potential to be found on a gigantic market and there is a chance for huge sales. Many photographers make a living off stock sites; they take pictures that have the potential to sell to different publications. You know those illustrations in brochures of piles of coins or people shaking hands or someone smiling into a headset? Typical stock photography. 

Earnings breakdown of Shutterstock.

Anyhow, Shutterstock is also home to many colouring pages and some of the largest publishing houses have jumped on the bandwagon and are churning out dozens and hundreds of books based on Shutterstock compilations. This is a quite different form of publishing compared to "single artist" books where the publisher works directly with an artist to make a book containing images from that particular illustrator. Johanna Basford is perhaps the best known such artist but there are a bunch out there such as Hanna Karlzon or another favourite of mine, Jenean Morrison.
You typically recognize Shutterstock books from the fact that they lack the name of any one artist on the cover. They could be a part of a series such as the Art Therapy books (although there are named artists featured in series of books too). Most of the time the image sources are displayed as Shutterstock and sometimes the name of the Shutterstock artists are displayed as well.

The Cons

One of the main problems with Shutterstock books is that you may encounter dupes or duplicates of images you already have in another such book. Occasionally the same image can appear multiple times within the same book! One of the stock books I have has double spreads where one image is full size and the other is a slightly enlarged version. I find this a lazy editing at best and bordering on a ripoff at worst. I mean, just look at these two pages:

The first page the left side is simple an inverted version of the right one. And the second page is just an enlarged and a zoomed out version of the exact same image. Like I said, this is really sloppy in my opinion and a cheap way to fill a bunch of pages that you then sell for 8 euros. Compared to how much more work must have gone into Johanna Basford's books that sell for 10-12 euros, I find these books very expensive in comparison.

Another con with these books is the paper quality. Very rarely is the paper good enough to hold even water-based markers or fineliners. The same fineliners that work perfectly in Secret Garden bleed through in many stock books. 

My third problem with these books is I don't know how much the artist gets paid for usage of their images. Probably not that much. I imagine if a publisher strikes a deal with an artist, the artist gets a chance to negotiate the contract so that everyone gets a fair share of the profits. Stock images are often purchased royalty-free, that is the buyer pays a fixed price for the image regardless how many times that image is then sold on. 

The Pros

Shutterstock books aren't all that bad though, and for all the con points there is a pro counterpart:

- Dupes can be a great way to practice and make different versions of an image without the need to make copies. If you like your books the way they are and don't care much for loose colouring pages, this is actually a great pro.

- Stock books give you a chance to explore the work of perhaps dozens of artists within the same book. This gives great variety and ensures you never tire of the patterns, and also gives you a chance to try new styles of pages. You may not love every page but most pages turn out beautiful when coloured, even if at first you're not thrilled with the lineart.

- The paper is not a problem with colouring pencils which is perhaps the most used medium anyways. Every limitation is also a challenge at the same time.

- The artists who upload to Shutterstock are in no way forced to sign the terms and agreements. I sell my photos through Getty Images who sells them for up to 700 euros a piece of which I receive perhaps 10%. But without Getty the photo would never have been sold at all because I hate selling stuff. So it's a great way to have someone else take care of everything for me and all I do is upload images I took just as a hobby (so no extra work) and receive some money to my paypal from time to time. 

- Ultimately, both stock books and single artist books contribute to the vast selection of books out there, so that everyone can find their favourites - For example, in this book I really love the square size and that each page is neatly framed in a small pattern. I love, love, love framed pages! 

Having stock books as well as single artist books on the market also enables more people than just the most noted artists to benefit from this huge new market of adult colouring. 

Here is a page from the above book. The book itself is one I picked up while vacationing in Rome. It's called I Libri Antistress Fiori from publisher EdiCart.

In the next post I will present and review my personal favourite from Shutterstock books which is also one of my absolute favourite colouring books!