Inktense Pencil Swatching

It’s looking grim outside, so I thought I’d try out those inktense pencils.  It’s hard to make a mess with these, so I think I’m OK with them in the kitchen.  I’ve done a load of swatches which are just drying off and will be put through the laminator later.

It’s looking like an interesting set of colours.  There are clearly warm and cool versions of the primaries, which is a great start.  A lot of these colours are looking like old friends under assumed names.  Fuchsia looks like quinacridone magenta, iris blue is looking a bit cerulean, bright blue is looking ultramariney, indigo is looking like Payne’s grey (and the W&N indigo and Payne’s grey do use the same pigments but in different proportions), sea blue is looking Prussian, teal green looks like viridian, mustard could be raw sienna, baked earth could be burnt sienna and willow will probably look like burnt umber if it’s laid on a bit more thickly.  Where it falls down slightly is that, with indigo, bark, charcoal grey and ink black all in the set, it may look a bit heavy on the neutrals.  And the greens (with the exception of the dirty looking leaf green) all look artificial and would need other colours mixed in if used in a realistic painting.

In doing these swatches, the ink felt like very well behaved watercolour, and that’s given me an idea about what I might do with these pencils.  I don’t like well behaved watery media – they just show up my weaknesses.  So I’m going to need to introduce some randomness.  What I plan to do is some drawings (maybe of people, maybe of buildings) using several different colours.  Drawn with lines, maybe also some shading.  Then I’ll either spray water on them or flick water on them or just put them outside in the rain if it’s coming down at the right speed.  And then I’ll tip the paper around or brush some of the ink around or maybe do some more spraying or paint on just enough lines to bring back the subject if it’s disappeared.  I’m not sure yet.  But there has to be some randomness there – I won’t be watering down all the pencil marks on the paper.