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) :)

Welcome Spring!

March is a particularly difficult month for me. Having lived in Hungary for several years I got used to Spring arriving in early March, with the trees starting to turn green at the turn of March/April. In these parts of Sweden March is still very much a winter month, although the snow is mostly gone and you can start seeing some fresh green moss for example. Still the temperatures are barely above freezing and there will be several minus degree days yet. Therefore I tried to colour the moth of March as cheerful as I could, with all sorts of pastelly colours. 

Mad sketching skillz!

I also included a small freehand drawing project. Since March 15 marks the anniversary of the Hungarian revolution in 1848, which is one of three Hungarian national holidays, I added the symbol of this holiday to the calendar: a cockade in the Hungarian colours red, white and green. I had never drawn such an item before so I started with looking one up on the internet. There I traced the outlines onto a bit of tracing paper that I then transferred onto a sketch pad where I experimented a bit with colours and shading. I finally transferred the sketched outlines onto the calendar page and proceeded with colouring it in. Considering my drawing skills and particularly the fact that I haven't practiced drawing for many years (or let's be honest, I have precticed drawing NEVER), I'm really quite pleased with the end result! It looks so much nicer in real life too. 

The tree is coloured in Faber-Castell Pitt Artist brush pens, and the cockade in Polychromos.

Blending stumps!

Pages from Dagdrömmar and Color me Calm where I prepared the background using Polychromos and paper stumps.

I get a lot of requests to explain about the paper stumps I so frequently use in my colouring projects. So here is a long overdue summary about this great tool! I personally find myself going more and more away from the colourless blender pencil, which I feel gives a more streaky and uneven finish, and using the paper stump more and more as I like the smooth smoky surface it gives. I have used it mainly for backgrounds in the past but nowadays I blend everything but the finest details with the paper stumps.

First of all, this is what they look like - a roll of cardboard with two pointy ends. You can find them in any art supply store and they are very inexpensive. I learned that there is a similar tool called a tortillon, which is hollow. These stumps are solid all the way through. I have never come across hollow tortillons in Sweden but you might want to know the difference if they are a thing in your country.

Like I shortly mentioned in my previous video, paper stumps are ideal for larger surfaces. But as they come in a variety of sizes, you can use them in quite detailed areas as well. 

Depending on how much pigment you have laid down with your pencil, you can use a very light hand, barely grazing the paper, or a more heavy touch, when blening. If you have several layers of colour on the paper it's enough to just lightly go over the paper with the stump to get a nice smoky blend. The stumps will conceal some of the streakiness in your colouring, but the blending will be much nicer if you try to lay down the colour as evenly as possible. You can clearly see the difference in this closeup where the orange bits were quite haphazardly coloured whereas the surrounding blue parts were coloured much more carefully before blending.
You can also use your blending stumps together with blending agents such as Gamsol or vaseline. However I only use mine dry so I cannot say anything about those methods. If I ever get around to trying that I'll make an update post about it!

As you can see in the first photo I keep a stump roughly per colour family. However these guys require cleaning from time to time. This is done with a piece of fine-grained sandpaper which I picked up at a hardware store. I cut the sheet in smaller sized squares so they would fit into a drawer compartment in my desk. 

Cleaning them like this will ensure they don't mess up your colour scheme and keep their point. If the point becomes too used up and frayed I just use a pair of scissors to cut it off then sharpen it again on the sandpaper. As the stumps are made of solid cardboard they will last a very long time. However if you find yourself with a pencil cup full of "dirty" paper stumps, you can create a craft project of its own and not let that precious pigment go to waste. One evening when I had no colouring inspiration I started scribbling on a blank sheet of sketching paper with a dirty stump. And before I knew it I had created this pastelly background that I can later fill with a drawing of some kind.

Below you will find a comparison closeup of two similar fields, the top one with no blending, just the layering of 2 Polychromos pencils, and the bottom one blended with a paper stump. And finally I enclose a short video that shows the layering and blending process. I hope this was helpful - Happy colouring!

A double page from Secret Garden

I spent several weeks on these pages. They are blended with the Caran d'Ache colourless blender pencils that I demonstrated in the video in the previous post. (If you clock on the picture a larger version will appear.)

Some blending tools

A flower design where the petals on the right are blended with a colourless blender pencil.

Blending is a great way to add some oomph to your coloured pencils. It can make the colours more vibrant, smooth out some of the streaks and lines and even protect your design from smudging. This Christmas I got my sister some blender pencils. As she was clueless as to how to use them - and she lives across the Atlantic -, I made her this video about my blender pencils of choice and a comparison with paper stumps, another useful tool. Perhaps the video will be useful to some of you who have been wondering about blending!