On May 9, I decided to try out a bamboo dip pen that I’ve had for ages and never used. I sketched the Church at Auvers-sur-Oise, one of the sites we will visit on my trip to Giverny, France, next year. (Click here for information about the workshop.)
I used SketchInk, color: Lilly, and found that it was difficult to control the width of the lines. They were either too heavy and loaded with ink or too dry – it was hard to find the sweet spot of having just the right amount of ink on the nib.
The bamboo pen is definitely not my favorite tool, but it was fun giving it a try. I may try it again using a different ink to see whether that changes anything. At any rate, I still enjoyed doing the sketch and daydreaming of Giverny.
I took a dramatically different approach on May 10th when I painted an abstract design using a limited watercolor palette.
I’ve been involved with an online class on abstract painting (with acrylics, no less!) since last fall and have found that I enjoy the freedom of playing around with paint and color without any preconceived idea of what the outcome may be. Now I’m having fun bringing these color experiments into my sketchbook using watercolors.
For this page, I taped off a square in my 9×9 Aquabee sketchbook and painted overlapping shapes using Marine Blue, Hansa Yellow Medium, and Permanent Rose. I dropped water into some of the washes as they were drying to create blooms. After the first layer dried, I painted/glazed over with more of the same colors.
What are your favorite colors for a limited palette? Feel free to share in the comments. I’d like to have a few new color combos to try some day this month.
4 Comments
Hi Leslie, this was timely information for me, as I had been wondering about bamboo pens ever since I watched a video of a talk given by artist Brenda Swenson. She mentioned that she has found that if you wet the whole bamboo pen (may even soak it a bit, not sure), that it holds the ink much longer. I don’t know if this will help with the problem of line width, but she indicated it writes much longer that way. Hope this is helpful!
Thanks, I’ll give that a try next time.
Hi Leslie,
I am in love with cobalt turquoise light and cobalt violet. I don’t know what other colour I would add to these two that would work together to enhance this palette. Perhaps it can’t be done.
Keep up your happy sketching and painting!
Jude
Maybe I’ll experiment with them a bit. Might be fun.