…last year and haven’t used them much… well I’ve been using them to write on the back of paintings, and I’ve used them in 3 or 4 studies so far, but only tentatively.
I didn’t want to get too many pens incase I didn’t like them so I bought myself a few pastel colours and white. I figured that I could use normal texta markers, like sharpies, if I wanted to go dark because they do draw over paint, but light coloured textas are transparent and don’t work well over other colours and you can’t actually get white textas or opaque pastels textas. You can get white gel pens though which draw over dark colours, but they are pens with a very fine tip, and they work great over watercolour.
The best thing to do when you get some new materials is to use them - have a play and make a mess with them, learn through trial and error. It’s a bit of a paradox really because once you get them out and the excitement dwindles after a the first try followed by disappointment (nothing works like you think it’s suppose to the first time), and then after the first few tries you don’t want to waste them on just any old mess when you don’t know how to use them masterfully, so they end up sitting there in the kit looking important… and very new.
that was also my experience with the watercolours I bought myself about a year ago - a nice little kit and it’s looking very new…still…
My first instinct is to draw with the paint pens, so I start the the painting with a messy drawing using the pens.
A few days later…
…as things would have it, being school holidays and all, I’m away in the country on holiday, so I can’t finish the paint pen bat or blog in time for my weekly post…unless…
…introducing my mostly unused watercolour kit…
I packed a light kit for watercolour en plein air, (I bought it for this very reason a year or so ago) and I tried outdoor painting in watercolour for the first time today. When I bought the supplies a year ago I bought a tiny little, good quality watercolour journal which is so lovely I was not ready to use it for just any old mess, so the next day I got for myself a cheap little journal from office works which I’ve about half filled by now.
I tried to condense my kit as much as possible for outdoor painting, so I can just stop and sketch without too much fussing around.
My first attempts at watercolour in my budget office works journal.