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Watercolor Effect with Acrylic Inks

I'm going to talk about the next thing that we're going to do we're going to be working with the acrylic thanks again and theocratic inks over top of watercolor paper just like a really super concentrated watercolor effect but before I do that I want I want to maybe add a resist layer to the background of my watercolor paper and to do that I'm going to use a white crayon you can also use oil pastels but a good simple white crayon does the job so even though I can't see what I'm doing here I'm just laying down some marks and again back to my good old motif of the circle I'm just putting some circles on the background of my white paper then I'm going to take my acrylic inc and this time I'm really not going to squeeze the top of it I don't want a whole lot of this to come out so what I'm doing is I'm laying I'm putting the tip of the acrylic I think high pat on the surface and then I'm not even squeezing and I kid you not it comes out of the tip I'm squeezing just a little bit to get it ...

to flow but I'm going to make a couple of marx again I liketo layer my marks so if I have circles going on the background if I do bigger circles over top it all just seems to go together and there's one color on there now but I can add a second color and even though we normally would say blue and orange going make brown together there's something about this marine blue and the flame orange when you mix them they make the most beautiful green because the flame orange is really a yellowy orange and the marine blue is like a really greeny blue so sometimes the rules don't apply you just have to play with and that's the thing you just have to play with your mediums and decide what work it's what looks great together so I'm going to add just a little bit of this flame orange to the inside of every circle maybe throw a couple more drops just a couple more drops on there. Ok, now, everybody, wherever you are, just take a peek up here because this is this is that moment, okay? I don't want you to miss it. This is just plain water in a spray bottle. I'm gonna start from a distance kind of gonna start to spray and I'm gonna get in a little closer, right? This I could do all day all day, every day at least I think this is the beginning of that paper that you loved so much this is it right here, this one's for you it's got your name on it, okay, so now see where that blew in the orange you're mixing to see the green ok why would blue and orange made green because it's marine blue and flame orange that's that's why I could lift and let it drift a little bit I call this etch a sketch art kind of lived and let it slip that way lift and let it exactly so that's the resist of the crayon now into this juicy thing that's going on here but wait there's more never ending you've got a whole a bucket of different tools they're different paintbrushes but I like to use things that are maybe not typically art supplies this is a bamboo skewer from my door in my kitchen and into this juicy acrylic ink here because there's still water on the surface I'm able to pull from the the darker more concentrated areas and kind of pull that color around oh my goodness I could take a paintbrush and sometimes I dio but for now I'm going toe stick with us really thin the thin line of this bamboo skewer until it's not working for me anymore and then I'm gonna pull a different tool you but I love the way that when this acrylic inc hits the splatter that this the little droplets of water on the surface it just weeks it out and makes this little feathery pattern right here I'm going in with a round paintbrush now and um um we're gonna d'oh you just get a variety of marks with a variety of tools go figure you get a variety of marks on I think that the most successful abstract thing that you have going on here is mixing your varieties of mark so you've got some thick bold marks you've got some really fine thin marks you've got the feathering of the acrylic inc that's going on see I have to entice you away from the jelly plate with something like this right and you need water color paper write this works great on watercolor paper you could do this on some of the other ones but let's start on the watercolor paper and then you can go on and do this on some of your other papers and see it just one of those try and see things the reason that it works so well in the watercolor paper is that the surface of the water color paper is sized so that it doesn't just soak in and stay put right it's ableto flow on the surface a lot better first rate white crayon first almost forgot my excitement tio well you've got two sides to that watercolor paper too but you know ok so this is turning brown right here but it's the most lovely shade of khaki brown was like a greeny brown it not like a you know a sticky brown that's really pretty my only my my big tip here is not over water it to just start far away and come in closer you can always add more water, but when you get too much water on there it just turns it into one big puddle and you kind of lose the you lose the line we're gonna start just I'm gonna start to stick if it does get really juicy and you have a lot of water on there what you can do is take your pipat and kind of suck some of it up so I don't have a whole lot here but these puddles maybe I've got more color here than I need, so suck it up into the pipe at and then I can actually maybe draw with that somewhere else another another another line quality there thicker when it's also still wet I can press things like bubble wrap into I want to be careful if it's really really wet and I push something like bubble wrap over top of it all of the pattern and design is gone, but if I'm kind of careful and strategically press this over top and start to move it around, I'm getting that design and this is where here's a good example take a picture if you love the way it looks take a picture because the next step you d'oh you may be like oh, I liked it a lot better before I did that but if you take a picture you always have that you can print it out just the watercolor paper have a front or back that's a great question it doesn't really matter in this technique if either side works great is a matter of fact I do this in my studio I have about I don't know I think there's ten big tables in there and I went a really good day for me is all the tables are clear because my studio theory has has visited and that's clean right and then I can lay out six sheets of these paper on each table so sixty sheets of this at one time from one into the studio to the other and I lay it all out and I do this and they come around me spray and then I come all the way back around I get everything dry I flip it over and I do it again and then I end up with this stack of really fun right? And then I turn him into a little journals that I sell and it's just really fun but this um you know it's pretty as it is but we can keep layering over top of it okay? So I kind of don't want to do anything more to it right now try a little bit of bubble wrap because that's because I can but again I'm gonna be strategic about where I put it and when we're not layering my second color I would play or next to this not on top you could put it right on top remember what I said with this one that blew and that orange just make this sort of khaki green but yes you're absolutely right if their colors they're going to make total brown or black um I usually do one color get it dry and they do the other color because that's the beauty of acrylics once they're dry they're permanent they're not going to keep lifting and bleeding although that said with the acrylic inks because they're so thin I do find that they dio bleed just a little bit but not a annoyingly so wow piece of thes air nice right? Really so baby wipes and acrylic thanks to tools it's only me I just really wouldn't want to do without ok so now that people often ask me what else can you use the acrylic? Thanks for well, what else would I want to use them for? Because this is so much fun but you can you can actually dip a brush into them and paint with them I'll use them to tent if I if I'm going somewhere and I'm doing art on the go and I don't want to bring like every color known to man of my paints all bring a bottle of white maybe even just so and I contend my paints with the acrylic inks it works great. Um like I said, you can dip a brush and paint with it directly from the bottle. I'm you can dip a pen in it if you're if you like the dip pens like a calligraphy pen, but this is quite quite possibly my favorite way to use these acrylic thanks. Now normally I would be taking my dryer to this because I want to move on. I want to turn it over, but what I'm going to show you next is when it gets almost or actually I'm gonna plug my dryer and tried a little bed. I'm not going to dry it all the way, okay, what's cool is when you get those drips going, if you spray him again just a little bit you're going to get the wicking away from those spots. So that's, why? If you start with less water to begin with, you can always add more and they see that the tool you really can move? Absolutely and then trying to that tunnel with your pipat and kind of suck some of that out. And then as you squeeze it, you can kind of move it around oh yeah oh yeah, yeah, and then you can move it around kind of draw with the ipads how are you liking this one? I know this is one of a everyone I say it's my favorite it's like my children I love them all yeah it's color it's on paper it's all good because we're working on a watercolor paper here watercolor paper is not my favorite for collage ing onto another surface but it is a great background for a book page itself so I can create this sort of thing and then cut this up and bind it together into a book often times I'll start with and I'll show you that what you guys are doing that I'll show you what that looks like so here's a book hopefully it's ok to do show and tell right here in the middle here is the book that started with this right and then each of these pages were going to do more techniques on top of this where we stamp with paint acrylic paint and layer it up if you if you missed it with some more water heard you say you couldn't see any of your crayon left if you missed it with some more water it'll allow the really dark lines that you've got going on there to thin out a little bit and you'll be able to see more of your crown to try that before you get too far and then here's the cool thing once you start drying it I've got it almost dry and take my paper towel roll and I'm going to see this is almost dry I mean, take my paper towel roll and I'm gonna roll it over the surface. Mine is really close to being dry. So it's not too much of it's not coming up on the paper towel, but that's going to get all those last little bits off of there now. It's dry? Yes, right. And it pulls up some of the really wet spots and it just changes it up. What's really cool. Is that the areas that I get dry? So I don't. If you can see this right there. The outside of it is dry, but the inside was still wet. And when I roll that paper towel across it pulled the inside of it out. And it just made that line even more interesting. Because it's dark on the outside and white on the inside. Absolutely. This is what I'm pointing to right there. See if there's any more of that happening a little bit over here. Mine was pretty straight ahead of me right there. Okay, this is the area right there. Okay. So see the outside of it started to get dry with the dryer, but the inside was still wet and when I rolled the paper towel over top of it, it pulled the wet from the inside of the line and the outside was dark. So, it's, just those little tricks that you get that start tio give you variation to your line, not only using a tool like the bamboo skewer to pull the lines out, which was right here, bamboo skewer was right there for their little thin lines. My pipat was over here, so you got really thick lines. I also took a paintbrush and drew into it. So you got some boulder line. I did wow there's, marine blue and flame orange, right? They're they're just magical. If I could stick with only four colors, if somebody said you could only have four colors of acrylic inc ever, ever, ever these were the four that I would pick marine blue, flame, orange, indian, yellow and process magenta. I could do everything I'd ever want to dio justin mike in my particular color scheme in the the colors that I just didn't really drawn to those four colors do everything I need. So there you have it.