Sketch, refine, scale, test: getting from idea to realisation (or not...)

Delighted to find my new batch of acrylic inks, ordered from Ken Bromely Art Supplies on Thursday evening, sitting on the porch mat on Saturday morning! Super-quick service and best price anywhere as there’s a special offer on right now.

So, down to business. First, a quick colour test – neat and allowed to run onto damp paper. Faves are vivid red orange, quinacridone magenta and vivid lime green - the boldest colours so no surprise there.

Next thing was to sort all the sketches I’ve amassed. Listed them all - 30 so far! Good grief - had no idea I’d done so many.

I stuck them all under a cut out frame for mounting A4 work, to see which would fit best as A4, A3 or both. I’ve been scribbling little drawings on random pieces of paper then scaling them up two or three sizes with a sketch-a-graph. It does make for some wobbly lines at times but sheez, I just have no patience for that squaring up process!

Now the hard bit. How am I going to present them? Some people loved the plain ink outlines – just that, nothing else. I like them too but I also love colour and want to offer some variations so, Sunday was test day to see how the inks worked on different surfaces and try out some ideas I had. Here’s what came of that:

The colour is extremely concentrated, so when I dropped a blob onto damp watercolour paper expecting it to ‘flower’ beautifully and randomly, it just sort of sat there with a ‘what, you think I’m gonna dilute myself?’ expression on its…face. I'm like ‘Yes, dammit!’ and prodded it around with a really fine brush to show it who’s boss (NB I swear that's the only time I will ever use the word 'like' in that way for a piece of writing!). Not what I wanted in its eventual, grudging effect but not bad, though not as agreeable as the much more watery calligraphy inks I tried last week.
So I pre-diluted it in a paint tray first and tried again. There was slight paper buckling (no, I didn’t bother stretching it first) but I also found the dilution was…too dilute so there’s obviously a fine balance to be achieved for perfect colour and ease of application as everything dried out really quickly - ink sinks into (cheap) watercolour paper too easily.
Also, if you get any of the pencil lines wrong, the paper is easily damaged when you erase it, no matter how carefully you do it.
I got a pad of canvas sheets from our local Works store. They're great for picking up basic art materials at bargain prices and they do a nice range of stretched canvases too. Nothing fancy but good to just test stuff on. The floppy surface felt a bit weird but it was so much better than the watercolour paper. The watered area stayed damp longer and the inks just sat nicely on the weave and moved exactly where I wanted them to go (still refusing to flower much. Stubborn beasties). I used a mix of tiny drops of pure ink and a bit mixed directly with water drops on the canvas so at least the brightness was more what I was looking for.
I repeated this technique using a piece of acrylic paper – again, being a denser surface with more texture to it, it gave a much better surface although…still no flowering so…
…Finally, I got another watercolour sheet and plopped on some calligraphy ink with no real plan. Just mixed two colours a bit and squiggled the ink around to fill in some areas. This actually looked pretty good in that it had some energy to it. I’m going to muck about a bit more with that idea for the next session.