 Hello and welcome to my YouTube channel. I'm Sandy Olock and I'm an artist. And if we haven't met yet, hey there, glad to see you here. I hope you'll subscribe to my channel and get more videos from me every Tuesday and Saturday. I want to talk about ink tense pencils today. In my previous video, I talked about the difference between color pencils and watercolor pencils, but one difference I wanted to point out, and I thought I'd do a whole video dedicated to it is ink tense pencils, because these are ink pencils, not watercolor pencils. They have slightly different properties. And I want to talk about those and some applications, some techniques, and I'll be using some stamped images from Colorado Craft Company that are new by Anita Jerome. Let's get started. If you're watching this video just for the Colorado Craft Company release and you don't care about ink tense pencils, you can skip ahead to almost 10 minutes and be able to see just that portion, because this is a long video today. Ink tense pencils. I made a chart because when I have a lot to say, if I make a chart, I can keep on track better and not blather so much. So ink tense pencils are brighter colors because they're ink pencils. They're not watercolor pencils. Yes, they work with water and people get it in their head that that means they're watercolor pencils, but they're actually not. They stay brighter even when they're dry than watercolor pencils do. Watercolor just tends to dull down a little bit and lighten. And that does not help happen nearly as much with ink tense pencils, not enough that it's super noticeable, just a little bit. But you can control that intensity because sometimes those colors are just way, way, way, way bright. Just put down less pencil. I just did a very, very light coating of pencil. And then I do the water over top of it and blend it. And it'll work just fine as a lighter color. And you could just get lighter and lighter and lighter by practicing putting down less and less pigment. And yes, you can get blends almost to white. We'll talk about that in a minute. But I'm going to blend this and then dry it completely because one of the things that the Ink Tense Pencil website at Derwent says about these pencils and everybody says they're permanent, they won't move. I'm going to tell you, you can layer over dry colors because the dry pigment is semi permanent. And I'm going to prove to you that I am right in just a moment. But what you're supposed to do is put some color over dry pigment. And you can see that you can put color right over that blue. The blue stays. It doesn't really soften the edge all that much. There's a little bit of the blue turning the yellow slightly, slightly green. But you'll see more about why that matters in a little bit. Now, the powder when you're using pigment powder, I like to use a tea strainer to make some powder out of my watercolor pencils. And I also do that with colored pencils. And you can put water down and then get a great texture in the water. It only sticks to where the water is. And you just blow off the pigment from the surface and you've got a great texture. You can put the pigment powder onto dry paper and just paint where you want it to stick. Now, here I just painted over that amount of powder, whatever it was. And then I blew on the right hand side. I just blew off the rest of the pigment and look how light it could make it. Almost looked like there was no pigment left on the paper, but there was just a few granules. So you can get a super pale color just by using powdered pigment. Now, blending for gradations, you can do that with a brush. You can do that with a baby wipe. These are just alternate ways that you can do some blending. And if I'm sketching on very lightweight paper and I don't want to put a lot of water down, I'll often use a baby wipe. And I'll even use it on watercolor paper like I'm using here. This is arches and you can get soft edges. You can get things that blend from dark to light. But look at how light the color is compared to using water with it. Water keeps the intensity unless you keep rinsing your brush. Every time you rinse your brush, you pull color out of the block that you've been painting. Same with a baby wipe. The reason that lightened is because half the colors left on the baby wipe now. Now, let's talk about that semi permanent, permanent thing because you can lift inktense and they tell you you can't. But I'm telling you, you can. I'm going to show you, you can. It's on certain papers. There was one paper that I tried. It was a cheap watercolor paper. Somebody sent me a swatch of it. It was a European company. I hadn't heard of them before. I don't even remember the name of it. But I remember trying inktense on it and I couldn't lift bupkus on it. So test the paper that you're using because that'll make a difference. But on arches and on I've tried it on Canson XL as well. You can lift. I'm going to prove that to you as well. Using some Canson XL in the crafty section of this video. So to lift, there's three different ways you can lift. One is to just take your time and scrub it with water. You can scrub that edge and slowly bring it to almost white paper. It depends on the color. If you've got a staining color, that might be harder to do. But look, look at what a baby wipe does. My magical baby wipes. I use these things for all kinds of stuff. You can totally lift the color off of Arches paper. Don't tell me these are permanent pencils. They're not. And then the last bit of lifting. I don't know if this is necessarily lifting, but when you get those little bits of pencil pigment that are stuck to the ridges of the paper, because cold press paper has ridges on it. Kind of has little mountains and valleys. And the paper kind of holds onto it on the ridges. And you end up with those little dark spots. Well, just work at it with your brush. And you can even put in some extra pencil pigment. Just, you know, grate some over the top of it so you have more to work with. And you can start to work in a good blend. But just notice every time I stop the brush, I get a hard edge. So that causes overall problems in terms of other things. And we'll talk about that later, too. But I wanted to show you intense blocks because you may be confused when you see those. What are they for? And they are basically an intense pencil in a stick form. That's really all it is. And you can put more color down all at once. So if you're doing something that you wanted to do a heavy sketch with, then you could use these easily. You can also, like, take the little wells that are in the palette and crush up a small chunk of them and then mix it with water and you make paint out of it. And then you have these bright, bright paints. You could also do that with pencil pigment. Put that into some water and make your own colors that way. So here I am just applying a bunch of colors. Now I had not actually drawn anything with these so I wasn't really sure what to do. I did put down more than I probably should have. They got a little crazy with my seals. These two seals are a picture that I found on Paint My Photo, which is one of my favorite places to get free photos that you can use without worry of copyright problems. And it's just these two seals. One of them has his flipper on the other. Like, he's either patting them on the butt or they're in love. I'm not really sure which. But I've been wanting to draw it. And so here we go. You're gonna see kind of a hot mess here. But I used red, yellow, and blue for my colors. And I wanted to show you that even with inktense, with everything, every medium, the rules of color theory apply. Because when I blended blue, red, and yellow together, I got neutrals. So I'm getting some neutral colors in these seals even though I didn't use any neutral except for dropping in some black when I got scared and everything started going haywire. I decided to make them really dark and contrasting. But look what happens as I start layering these colors and just kind of mushing with my brush over top of them. I get browns because that's the colors of pigment that are on the paper. And one of the other things inktense has in their pencil set, if you buy the full set, is you get an outliner pencil. And the sketch that I drew in the first place, that outline sketch was drawn with the outliner and I'm using the outliner here. And that is not water soluble, but it has to feel more of the inktense pencils rather than just using a regular pencil because you can draw with a regular pencil. But that gives you just a little bolder feel. It feels more like using the black pencil but it's just not waterproof. So don't use that thinking you're gonna water color it because it won't move with water. You can erase it a little bit as you're sketching. Now let's look at the Colorado Craft Company release along with some techniques used in each one of the projects. They have three new mermaids and they're big stamps. So they'd be like a five and a half by five and a half kind of card, big square ones. There's one that has a whale and a walrus and a bunch of other things in it. This one has flying penguins or well swimming penguins unless she's flying I suppose. And then this one has seahorses. Very cute, big stamps just so you know. And then there's two minis. I love these minis as soon as I saw the walrus I knew I had to color him because he's so cute. And I paired it with the seagulls because the walrus is half a walrus as you can see. So I had to come up with a creative way to stamp the walrus, you could stamp him on the side of the paper and make him peeking in but you could also put him in between the piers or you could just put one of the piers on with one of the seagulls. But I decided to put them here next to him and he's kind of crawling up on the beach because the two piers have some lines drawn below them as if they're in the sand. So these two posts are in the sand, he's behind them and I drawn a little hillside that he's sitting up on, he's kind of propping himself up. I drew a horizon line and some water in the background and I also had to draw the walrus' butt because that was not included in the stamp. It's just that left half. I started by using a light brown color to apply to the paper just by scribbling color on and using a brush to move it. Very traditional way of using inktense pencils and the amount of pigment that you put on will indicate how dark it's gonna be. So you use light color, you'll get light sand if you use a heavy application of color, you'll get a lot more in there. Really depends on the look you need for what you're coloring and you can blend it out with water until it's kind of soft on the bottom edge and I added some powdered pigment into it while it was wet so that that would stick in there and then dried it without moving any of that pigment so the sand texture would remain. I used the same color for the piers but I added to it some charcoal gray and I've added it in the center because the lighting for this is behind the walrus and the pier and the birds so the shadows are gonna be facing toward the viewer. So the shadow is on the side that you're seeing so it's in the center and there's a little bit of light curling around the two sides of each of the piers but not very much. Same thing with the walrus, he's gonna have light curling around the outside edges of him too and the darkest part is in his center and where that flipper is that I'm painting and the contrast between having him be in the shadow and dark and the light tusks makes it very clear that he's a walrus. So paint all of that out using a brush if you start getting too much dark color and you find yourself dragging color around, just rinse your brush so you have a clean brush and you're not moving pigment any more than necessary. To create some shadows, I made them angled toward the sun so that you get that indication that that's where the light source is and once I painted over these, they were wet and I added more powdered pigment in since moving the water over top of that removes that texture from the underlying powdered pigment that was sitting down there and then started painting in the water leaving a little bit of reflection for the sun in the water itself and then it was time for the sky. Now I just released a sunrise sunset class which is something I talked about in my last video. It's taught in both color pencil and water color pencil and here's an idea if you're gonna take that class in inktense pencils use very light pigment instead of the heavy coverage that you'll see in class and use a baby wipe to move the color. The baby wipe pulls more color off the page rather than using a brush to slosh it around and you can also move it in softer ways than you might be able to. You could even try this with regular color pencils not just with inktense pencils. While it was drying, I put some detail into the water just using a pencil and I'm not gonna do any water with it just leave the pencil lines on there and then I got the idea to use the baby wipe as a brush since I'd already used it as a brush to move the yellow why not use it to add the red without getting really hard edges in there. I did get some scrubby edges because of just the nature of the way that a baby wipe applies color but once I finished applying the basic red that I wanted I could use the baby wipe on that pigment a clean section of the baby wipe to move the color around and soften the edges. So again, another way to achieve the same kinds of techniques that are used in the class but with inktense pencils because then at least they won't be like electric screaming bright. And then of course had to add some seagulls because that's what I do and I'll show you the card at the end of the video. So the mermaids, I did a project with all three mermaids in one project and I started by drawing a box around each one of them so they would have a border and for this one it took me forever to color it just lots of little bits and trying to get the blending good and some of the blending didn't work so I started doodling and then I got carried away doodling over all of it adding more texture onto the water adding texture onto the rocks and I'm a doodler that's just what I love to do so doodle your heart out as far as I'm concerned for the penguins I decided to use the charcoal gray and anytime you're coloring something in inktense that's supposed to be black start with the gray you can always add black to it later but if you start with a gray you have some opportunity for subtle color differences the black is really hard to keep it from getting too crazy because the black is really intense and really powerful this is gonna help to soften that a bit. For the background I thought I was doing something genius I was gonna make this really easy all of this coloring by just coloring the whole background first in one blue and then go in and color all of the swirlies in a dark color just something darker and let it be at that and it was maybe a smart idea until I used too dark of a color and I didn't like the amount of contrast that I had going on in the background now because that contrast draws your eye and by the time I color the mermaid your eye is still gonna be looking at all that contrast and I wanted to soften that so I added a bunch of pencil onto the background thinking I'll just go over this with just a light touch with this nice wide super soft brush and I had to kind of work my way around the penguins and as I was doing that look at what starts to happen color is lifting so don't let nobody tell you it's permanent because it's lifting right here on camera before your very eyes so when you're doing any kind of color layering test your paper and test the pigments just test, test, test, test, test take a swatch and just test a corner of something so that you know what's gonna happen because at first I was ready to toss this I was really worried because now I didn't have any contrast and do I just go around the whole thing and wipe off all the color I decided to try to see whether it was just that corner or whether I just needed a softer touch and I did use a lighter touch as I moved on to see if I could retain the color in the background but it still did lift some it was just really tough, really tough to do this I ended up doing some doodling here which the camera had a little corrupt spot on the card apparently because it didn't save that was just the one chunk it didn't save out of all the chunks but you'll see the results in just a moment for the third mermaid I drew some circles with a compass onto the paper and used powdered pigment I just sprinkled powder pigment in an area and then started painting into one of the circles and used different amounts of powdered pigment every time I got a section done I would just blow the color off of the rest of the paper made sure there was no pigment left and then could switch to a different color or a different amount of color on the page so I could end up with a whole bunch of overlapping circles in various shades and tints of greens and blues so here is the finished piece all mounted on one long strip so this is all of the juicy detail in the mermaid and whale stamp kind of one I love adding all those little extra bits and here's the result from the circular one and for that one I decided to go around each of the circles with a pen as well to just give it a little more definition which was fun and the third one is the one with all the doodling that didn't capture on film I also added a whole bunch of bubbles to it because I wanted more to pull the eye to the mermaid and not as much to my crazy background that I had such a giant fail with but the whole piece is actually gonna be a prize next month in Art Venture so if you haven't joined Art Venture now would be a good time to go do that and here's how the mermaid folds and you could stand it up in the studio on a shelf for some inspiration if you were the winner and of course my little card, so cute gotta love this little walrus, be adorable thank you so much for watching this video if you liked it please click the like button and hit that subscribe if you haven't already the links to everything you need to know are in the doobly-doo down below this video and I will talk to you guys later get out there and create something every day, bye bye.