Acrylic Ink

Acrylic ink is generally a pigment or dye in an exceedingly low viscosity acrylic binder. You can paint with it, or use it with paint as part of a larger work, or you can use it as ink. That’s what I’m doing now. I’ve picked up some Daler Rowney acrylic ink and I’m using it in my Indigraph pen. It’s a pen that can use india or any pigment based ink without drying out and becoming unusable.

I picked up sepia. Daler Rowney’s sepia is a semi-opaque, pigment ink using PBk7, PR112, and PY1:1 for a nice rich brown sepia. It’s less red than I expected, really only having worked with sepia pencil before this. Anyway, I like it. Turns out acrylic ink dries fast, so fast I thought maybe it was because the pen. So I tried it in a boring old dip pen and it still dries “instantly” for all intents and purposes. Seriously, 3 seconds (didn’t I tell you 3’s are events after all), about the time it takes me to set down a pen and pick up a brush and the stuff’s dry.

Apply it really heavy, going back and forth over an area a bunch of times and that turns into half a minute, but that’s still fast as heck. Three days in and it still flows immediately when I pick up the Indigraph so I’d say I’ll be using acrylic ink for the time being.

Inktober XXIII

For the record, it’s weird as hell that juvenile vultures look old as fuck. This is really just me testing to see if I can erase the non-photo blue penciling I did after it’s covered with an ink wash or not. Gotta wait till it dries, but we’ll see.

Inktober XXII

Apparently there’s drawing prompts associated with each day of Inktober? Lame.

So today is “Ghost”. There’s a couple photos floating around on the web, search Krokodile and wade through the mess to find them, you’ll know. A couple photos of this woman who’s missing the half of her face. It’s arresting. You can see the light on her sphenoid bone and the zygomatic arch is open where one entire eye is gone. She’s probably dead now, so Ghost applies I think. Beauty might be more explicit though. And I don’t mean in some degenerate death-and-decay-is-beauty way. No. Never. I mean it in that life, is staggering and terrible in it’s beauty. Here’s this woman, bones of the maxilla and mandible exposed, alive, standing and posing. Tenacious, and beautiful. Yellow bone, sores, and pink living tissue together. They show these Cloverfield-Alien-vs-Predator movies and I think no, we are so much better than all of that. In any case, sparse clean lines seem appropriate.

Inktober Day Nineteen

If I could only draw one thing for the rest of time, I’d be okay with that one thing being my askew lil’ portraits of randos who have photos of themselves floating around out there.

It might be a bad sign that I make them all slightly crazier than they, well…

Inktober Turkey Vulture Two

I think I wouldn’t mind being a Turkey Vulture when I grow up.

Really happy with the Indigraph pens performance. Must be all in my head that it cuts down on the tremors though, still too shakey.