Catching up after not posting yesterday…
Inktober Day 19: "Arctic"
Well, I’ve come to that point in the challenge where I just don’t give a crepe any more. This always happens, sooner or later. I don’t like a prompt, or I’m just not inspired… And even though I usually force myself to “do something”, I’m often not happy with my results. Possibly because I’m not putting in much effort. In a challenge that is already pretty low-effort on the best of days.
Anyway, I did pick up an ink pen and doodle something “on theme”. Dogs pulling a sled across the vast, arctic emptiness of a blank page. No-one on the sled, because I was too lazy to try to doodle a person… And to show that it’s the arctic, we have the World’s Least Impressive Rendering of the Northern Lights. (Ooh, ahh!)
They can’t all be mediocre winners. Some of them have to be well below par to make the average ones really shine, you know?
(Someone’s in a great mood today!)
Inktober Day 20: "Rivals"
Still riding the low from Day 19, this prompt (“rivals”) also struck a sour note. Well, I had a couple of ideas, but I just didn’t want to doodle. When I finally sat down at the end of the day to attempt something, I wasn’t thrilled with my results.
…Then I decided to really lean into the ugly. Why not? I wasn’t going to start over again. So this is how today’s doodle turned out:
And you know, in the end I almost even like it, maybe because it’s so gosh-darned ugly and poorly done. I can almost convince myself that it has character. (And maybe it’s not actually much uglier than my average doodle for this challenge has been, so far. It can be hard to see things objectively.)
In addition to the usual gouache and/or watercolor over the ink, this time I also added some color pencil and acrylic marker.
Experimenting with Tempera Paint Sticks
I have several tempera paint sticks that I just haven’t been using as much as I’d like. I think I need to experiment some more to find ways to use them that I like. They don’t work as well with my usual techniques/materials. (You can’t watercolor over them, really, for instance, but they’re difficult to use much as a top layer if you draw/paint on a small scale, as I do.)
Something I was watching recently made me wonder if you could paint gouache over them. For those who aren’t familiar with gouache, it’s basically like a more opaque version of watercolor. That’s an over-simplification, but gouache (not acrylic gouache) is a water-soluble medium that you can thin down with water, clean up with water, mix like watercolor, reactivate with water, etc.—but if you apply it thickly, it can be much more opaque than watercolor.
Anyway! I put down a couple colors of the tempera paint sticks, blended them slightly with a fingertip, then tried painting a simple cat shape on top with gouache.
I thought the tempera had dried enough, but the gouache I applied was picking up some of the blue and purple, so maybe I didn’t wait long enough. The gouache also didn’t cover as well as I hoped, but that might be because I had added too much water…
I left it to dry, and the next day I added some details with acrylic paint pen and a white gel pen.
This was just a quick experiment, but I kind of like the effect—though I don’t know how well this will hold up. (Will the gouache crack or crumble off?)
I put down another blob of the tempera paint stick next to this one, and I’m trying more gouache over it, so there will be more experimentation coming soon.
The tempera paint stick might work better on a less textured paper. With this cold-pressed watercolor paper, some of the page tends to stay white, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I kind of like the texture here, but there may be times when you want a finer finish. If I don’t get sidetracked, I might try some different paper next.
