ARGH This is so awesome. I love her pages so much. Go check out her channel and subscribe. Her journaling exemplifies life. Also Watercolor pencils? Too cool!
ARGH This is so awesome. I love her pages so much. Go check out her channel and subscribe. Her journaling exemplifies life. Also Watercolor pencils? Too cool!
I've been workingon the automatic drawings, and one of the directions I've wanted to take them is to use a very fine pen with a nice gray ink as the first layer of the drawing. I considered using pencil but really don't want to be able to erase the lines. Part of the automatic process is that the lines stay from start to finish. I wanted to use the gray ink with my extra fine RapidoCraft pen to get a fine hairline that fades into the background when a darker color is put of the top.
I searched the network's archives to see if I could find a gray ink that fulfilled my needs. I found a few reviews, but gray inks don't seem to be too popular. I then went to Gouletpens.com and checked out their swab shop tool to see the colors of the grays they had in stock. Still nothing definitive. Instead I ordered 5 samples of gray colors. Each was from a different brand and most I'd seen mentioned at some point on the network.
The 5 colors I ordered were:
Omas New Gray
Private Reserve Gray Flannel
Diamine Grey
Noodler's Lexinton Grey
Iroshizuku Fuyu-syogun
And my 4 needs are:
That it survive being wet and not bleed too profusely. A distinct line must remain.
It not foul pale watercolors like yellow.
It not foul shades of blue, turning them muddy or green
It recede to the background when black is put over the top in a drawing.
I performed a test on each of these criteria with each ink on 3 types of paper:
Clairefontaine Graf It
Canson Universal Sketch 65lb
Exacompta Plain Journal
The results were the same across all papers, though with the Graf It there was additional lifting across the inks when lifting was noted.
Diamine Grey was too dark to be a grey I would use for my drawings and it lifted the worst of all the inks.
Private Reserve Gray Flannel was also too dark for my use. I can't say that I actually like this color either. It has a green cast to it that I do not enjoy. It was also the second worst for fouling the pale watercolors. It was also barely discernible from black.
Noodler's Grey was the only ink that did not lift at all. Thus colors floated over it's surface and were not fouled nor muddied. However, it is very dark when in a pen running wet. It might be a contender if it were in a dry pen. I will be loading this into my freshly cleaned RapidoCraft XF to see if it will work. I'm not convinced. It does hands down win on every other test.
Iroshizuku Fuyu-syogun was a good shade that is easily discernible from an overlay of black. It did lift, though not badly. It slightly muddied the pale colors, though not too badly. I really like the color. It does not fit the bill because it is too blue. It's also REALLY expensive.
The perfect shade of gray is the Omas New Gray. It perfectly matches the pale silvery line of pencil. It's clearly gray without a green tinge or looking like I added a bunch of water to my black ink. It's just a cool clear gray. It's pale on the page and black ink pops on top of it. It does however lift. It muddies the pale yellow but mixes well with the pale blue. Even when it does lift it leaves behind a discernible line.
I have one last test. It will require me to leave the inks on the page over night to see if time will allow them to bond with the paper more. Given how I work the more immediate test is the better indicator of how the ink will respond to me and my methods of working but the additional information will be useful. Click any of the images to see these tests in hi-res glory.
The above images is the Canson Universal Sketch paper.
This is the Clairefontaine Graft It pad.
This is the Exactompta plain journal.(review on this to come.)
A nice way tot start the day- sketching with breakfast. If you've never seen MIllande's YT channel you're missing out, she's got some great art journaling tutorials.
My friend Jane and I go on what I term "Art Adventures" every other weekend. This weekend she wanted to see my set up for shooting videos and so she did. She'd also been itching to see the cricut machine in action. We drank tea, talked and drew together. I shot a automatic drawing video with her present (that was a first) and told her what I was doing with the set up, start to finish.
After that we got on the computer and I did a little video editing- sandwich method style (aka using my own template) and we dug out the cricut.
While she was here we talked about the endless possibilities that Makes the Cut gives to the cricut (Don't worry I gave her a primer on the evils of the litigious overlord ProvoCrap) and stuck a RapidoCraft in there. From there it snowballed, more ideas, and more. I'm telling you, it was great, I looked at the cricut and MTC with new ideas.
After that I cut these- gears of my own design, 100%, not Tim Holtz's but mine. Using MTC I combined basic shapes to get these.
I'm really digging the style in these art journals. Sketches, doodles, experiements, personal ephemera; all the stuff I think belongs in an art journal are there. Check it out:
I"ve posted stuff by woman on fire before but I just found this video and I hadn't seen it. So here it is.
book 21.2 (july 1994 – winter 1994) from womanonfire on Vimeo.
This is how it starts, one day you forget your notebook for class and all you've got is your sketchbook so you take notes in it, you decide you like the look and suddenly an art journal is born.
sketchbook cambiose from raquel pinheiro on Vimeo.
sketchbook dragão da maldade from raquel pinheiro on Vimeo.
sketchbook from raquel pinheiro on Vimeo.
Over the last couple of days I’ve been dealing with very good customer service, the kind of customer service people talk about how good it was. I made an order from one of my favorite companies and it got screwed up. It arrived in the mail, I’d been waiting for it, eagerly. I contacted the company and they took care of the issue in a way that will have me forever telling people about their exceptional customer service and I’ll keep coming back.
I’ve asked myself in the past what is cheaper, not replacing/repairing a book or piece of art and having the customer talk about that forever or is it cheaper to replace/repair the book/ art and have them talk about me in glowing terms forever?
Let’s put it this way, I will forever talk about the company that gave me great customer service and I have customers from over 10 years ago that still come back to me. Why? Great customer service. If anyone who bought a book from me, even 13 years ago tracked me down and asked me to repair it? Guess what, I’d do it,happily.
Oh yeah, the company that gave me exceptional customer service? Gouletpens.com
I saw these over on the jetpens blog and I thought to myself, "I bet I can make those out of leather." Here are my results:
It's a simple project. Cut a strip of leather .75 inches wide (15mm or so) and 3 inches long (7.5cm). Get some no sew snaps- I used 7/16th's size because it was all Michael's carried and I was too lazy to stop someplace else. Use the tools to hammer on the snaps, the snapping together bits must be on the same side of the leather to make these.I left just enough leather on each end so I could grab it and pull the snaps apart.
They work AWESOME.
These could be made with canvas or fabric as well. I could see these made out of vinyl too. So many possibilities with sucha simple project!