30 Minutes With Inktense

After work today I had 30 minutes to run out here to the studio and mess around.  I’ve been anxious to begin learning how to use my new Inktense Watercolor pencils on fabric.  Youtube has great videos on the subject, but nothing replaces jumping in and giving it a go. 

Drawn on a piece of an old bed sheet, I didn't even take the time to get the wrinkles out. 

With only half an hour to spend I knew it’d be a fast, down and dirty experiment- so of course it was fun because there was no possibility of pressure to perform.  Drawing out a rectangle with the highlighter pencil- which came with my set of 24- showed me that that pencil is more than fluff, it worked smoothly and made drawing on the fabric easy. 

The Inktense pencil marks, laid in dry onto dry, before water was added.

Figuring I’d start working dry into dry fabric, I laid down two blues in the sky area and then began to add water to blend them.  I certainly won’t need to do that again.  The color bled out of the picture plane with the water and left strong pencil marks on the material as well.  Oops. 

Well, all I could do at this point was sit and watch the color run. The weird looking patches are the fabric stuck to the board behind it with water.  

With that understood, I wet down the whole thing and began to stroke the pencils into the rest of the piece dry into wet.  That worked great, actually.   The colors were intense, but stayed right where I put them in, no feathering out of their boundaries. 

The finished piece, drying.  This stuff has real possibilities.

Where I had not completely wet the fabric, namely at the left edge of the mountain shapes, the ink bled out again.  However, as long as the fabric was wet, I could add color over color and the hues just got richer.  The thin brush shapes kept their lines and the wide areas didn’t run into them. 

Detail of where the color ran in the area I hadn't pre-wet. 

Okay, this was fun.  When I get to town next, I will purchase a bottle of fabric medium to use instead of water on round two.  I suspect that the results will be quite different.  It was a fun exercise, even if a very short one and I will certainly be trying more of this.  

Thanks for stopping by! Alice