 Hello there, it's Sandy and today I'm going to be painting with fountain pen inks and using a little bit of bleach. These are two of my big bottles of ink. Most inks don't come in giant bottles like this, but that means I need to use them. So I thought I'd try doing some painting with them. And I've done a sketch here in which I'm using some bleach on it. I've dipped a glass pen, which is really just a piece of glass shaped into a pen. Dip it into a little container of bleach. Let it sit there for a second and then lift it off with a paper towel. It's a very easy kind of technique to do. The large blobs in the background were done using a cotton ball and the bleach. So you can apply it with lots of different things. Just don't use a brush on it. The stamps I'm going to use today are from Penny Black and they're two beautiful whales. And I'll be using these two inks that I cannot pronounce properly. I'm pretty sure I would get them wrong, so I will let you just read them on the bottles. I have a bottle of bleach, a glass pen, and a brush, which I'm only going to use on the inks. Don't use your brush with the bleach itself. So I'm going to start by putting some of the color onto a tile. You can do this on a plate, whatever kind of thing that you would like. I use tiles in my studio for lots of different things, so I keep a couple of them in the drawer. They're only like $0.89 or depending on what size, $1.29 at the hardware store. And I've put water down first so the ink color will move. For the most part, inks are relatively staining. And it doesn't apply to every single ink in the same way, but I didn't want hard edges. So I tried to put the water down first, which keeps the color moving. Inks are more intense in color than watercolors are. So if you want really strong, intense color, these are going to give you more of that effect. Watercolor tends to dry back a lot, lighter or a lot, more desaturated than it goes on. So inks are helpful that way. They're not very cost effective though, because you need to buy a bottle of it. And sometimes those bottles can be expensive. These are high quality inks. They're going to cost a little more. And since I used them for my drawing as well, I thought I would try to do some painting with them. And they worked nicely. For the underside of the whale, I used a little more water and I'll barely touch the tip of the brush to the inks so that I don't pull too much in. Out of these two colors, the stronger one is definitely the bluer one as opposed to the green. The green is a much softer color. Each of them will react a little bit differently based on how much water you also use on the paper. So I'm using lots of water underneath before painting this one. You may have noticed a little bloop by the tail. I'm going to apply some bleach to that with the glass pen. And after it sits for a moment, dab that off and that will be gone. That is another nice feature of using inks. Not all inks will react to bleach, but test them out ahead of time and then you will know whether or not you can afford to goof up. On this one, I am not putting water down first. I'm just going to paint the inks themselves, see what happens. I want to watch how they blend with each other and how hard does that green edge stay. Because with some inks, they don't lift, well, most inks don't lift, meaning I can't go back in and soften it. I can go over top of it to blend an edge, but you can't really lift much of that color out unless you go to the extreme of using bleach. It's not like watercolor in that way, where you can just keep pushing it around while it's still wet. So here I'm going to add in some greens and blues together and try to mush them around a bit. The line that I got across the green was a little stronger than I wanted, so I just painted some extra green over top. That smoothed things out quite nicely, which was good. And the intensity of the color is definitely remaining. You don't tend to get a whole lot of really dark color by putting layer after layer of ink, like you do with some mediums as well. So that's another benefit to painting with ink, even if it's more expensive because you need to buy a whole bottle in order to have a little bit to paint with. After finishing up the whale, I moved to the technique that I had used in the previous whale and put the water down first so I could get lighter color on the water drops as well as in the thought bubble. I'm assuming it's a thought bubble because I don't know that whales can actually say ahoy there. And if they do, you might have been consuming a little too much rum on the ship that you are in. That's quite possible. But I wanted it to be readable, so just put some very light color in there. Next is to let them dry. And I did that for a while, went off and did a few things around the house, came back and was ready to get my fountain pen out to do some drawing. I had seen online quite some time ago an illustrator and I wish I had saved it. I just remember the idea of drawing a landscape inside of an animal drawing. And she had done this, I assume she, you know, maybe he, they had done this inside of, I think it was a wolf that I saw, some, some such. I can't quite remember what, but I want to see if it would work here because I do love drawing trees. I haven't had much time for doing drawing lately. I have been a little bit busy with lots of other things and my pens have been feeling loadsome and when I got the inks out, my fountain pen said, hey wait a minute, get back here. I want to also get in on the action. If you want some tips for how to draw pine trees like these, there is a whole video on just that topic, works for other mediums as well as fountain pen, but it's created in fountain pen. So downloadable with it as well. And speaking of drawing and pine trees and those sorts of things, I realized belatedly that I forgot to put other classes into my sale category. Every month I put different groupings of classes on sale and I just tossed a whole bunch of drawing classes, both pen and ink and pencil and charcoal and all kinds of things into the sale category at art-classes.com. So I will have a link to that in the doobly-doo as well as the pine tree video. So if those are helpful to you, you don't have to be able to draw with anything at all to take one of the beginner drawing classes. One of the best ones that I've seen people make the most improvement in their other mediums after taking is 30 days to more confident sketching. It's just done with a pencil and a sketchbook, but it gets you used to drawing things so that you don't panic when somebody says like this, draw some trees into a whale. It just helps you to feel more confident in your skills after spending 30 days in a row just drawing something, just 10 minutes a day. Just do something for a few minutes and that will really make a vast difference for you. So next up is the other whale and wanted to do something with the bleach on this one. So started to make some dots on the top. I was considering whether or not this would look like the shimmering of water on top of the whale. Could I make it do that? I don't get a lot of control with the glass pen. It kind of bloops out and sometimes you'll even need to tilt the glass pen really vertically to get it started because sometimes it stays in all of those curved shapes that are on the tip of the nib and then started looking like you had freckles. That seemed to be a small problem for this poor whale. Freckles are not something that I think they have undersea because they come from the sun, but there you go. I have instead chosen to watercolor over top of it with another layer of the inks to soften that so that at least it didn't look like freckles and it came out looking a lot more like slightly dappled water. Just a tiny bit underneath the color that I put for the top layer and you may decide that I should have left it alone but you could always go back in with another layer of the bleach if you needed to. A little heads up on these, you want to make sure that you're actually using paper that can handle the bleach. So do a few tests first before you dive headstrong into a project like this. I'm using Arches watercolor paper, which holds up well. All right, that's it for me. I will see you again very soon. Take care and have a wonderful day. Links in the doobly-doo to all the stuff I talked about.