For portability reasons I’ve done my last few bugs with my mighty pencil case of the water soluble. (Best thing I’ve ever bought for storage!) It was nice to get back to the familiar and recognize I can still get excited over the vibrancy of inktense.
I played around with my watercolour brush pens, derwent watercolour pencils, bruynzeel watercolour pencils, but I just wasn’t achieving what I wanted. I had too many primary colours going and not enough brightness to play with. If I ever invent a set of anything I will make it not the standard primary colours because that’s what is in all of the other sets. *cue angelic music* And then my derwent inktense to the rescue.
I had a theory about hot press paper and pencils. Cold press paper has so much texture that sometimes even when you wet it over and over again the colour still sits on top on the texture. It is one of the reasons I do so many layers, to try and get it as smooth as I can. My thoughts were it couldn’t do that with the smoothness of hot press. I was a little bit wrong. It can still do it a bit because it is partly the texture of the pencil itself. I bought a inktense pan set for this purpose, but I’m just not utilizing it as much as I thought due to the colour restrictions in it. This is one of the reasons why I wanted to learn watercolour. I wanted to get rid of that texture.
It is really too bad I love inktense so much because I think it might just be them causing a texture. I have a single Caran d’ache museum aquarelle and it dissolves its texture so easily. Someday I will have many more. Someday. $7 a pencil is just hard right now. Especially when I have so many others already.
I don’t think I will ever be an artist that works with a restricted palette, even though I should brush up on my colour mixing skills.
I do wish watercolour was taught in my visual arts program at school, but here I am taking a stab at it now. I feel like this was the way it was meant to be.
