 Hey there, it's Sandy, and later in this video I'm going to be painting some snowy skies, but first I'm going to assess a medium. And these are the Ph. Martin's Bombay Inks that I have had for a long time. They're India Inks, and I knew there would be a good bit of testing. I still have a lot I want to try with them, but I decided to at least start the process because they've been sitting here collecting dust. Normally I use some of my fountain pen inks to paint with, and those come in 50 milliliter bottles and they're one-off, so you can't get a whole set of them. These come in 30 milliliters, so they're smaller, but you get a whole rainbow of color. And I'm trying to see if these are something I can recommend, and right now I wouldn't necessarily say I have a strong recommendation for them unless you like the properties that these have. When I swatch my inks, I swatch them differently than I do my watercolors. I swatch them on larger pieces of paper because I want to have more room to see what the properties are because when I discovered that some of the fountain pen inks will respond differently to water, they'll change color, or they'll completely not water out, or they'll water out really well. And then they also, some of them will react with bleach or with alcohol, there's all different kinds of things you can try with inks that you don't necessarily find work very well with watercolors. So I treat them as a kind of different category of something to paint with. What I have done here is painted them on a wet surface so that at the top you get the full color, toward the bottom you get lighter color so I can see if there's a color shift. And then with a glass pen and some bleach, I just drop a little bit of bleach on there while it's wet because I want to see what's going to happen to it when you use it while the ink is fresh versus what happens when you try to add it later. And so here I'm trying to add bleach dots to some of these to just see how they react. And what I found in general from these Bombay inks is that they don't react at all. They just couldn't care less about bleach unless it's wet because then you can get a little bit of reaction while they're wet but you don't really get much of anything. Ironically, you get more bleach action when you're looking at it really close in the lightest areas. So instead of the lightest areas, the darkest areas are the ones that don't react at all. I think that's because they stain a lot. They're inks, they're not watercolors like I said, but here you can see how you do get white dots in the light areas but you barely get any kind of shift in the darker areas of the inks. What that would mean if you wanted to do snow then you could do a light background to add the bleach dots to it but it wouldn't really help otherwise. So you know that's just something to take into consideration. There are different inks that will act differently. There are some that will completely change color when you drop bleach into them. Some of them react when the ink is already dry. Some of them only react when it's wet. And you really have to test every single brand and every single color within every single brand because they're all different. Everything's different. It's one of the only times that I find swatching is super helpful is when I'm looking at the properties. Some of these inks were thicker than I expected. It could be because they've been sitting here for a long time but some of them also are the same kind of thing I found with a few of the liquid watercolors that P.H. Martin's makes. There's just certain colors that are kind of thick and goopy as opposed to being flowy, I guess. So this is the book that I use for all of my my swatches for my inks. And I test all the colors out. You could see some of them. The color changes a little bit when you put the bleach on them, the white words there were written in bleach. And then some of them react not at all. There's absolutely no effect from bleach. So this book helps me to remember which colors that I want to try something with. If I want to do a painting and I want it to change from purple to blue, I'll pick one of those kinds of colors. And this book is super helpful in that. And I also try to see what the color looks like when it's written with a pen versus poured on with a brush, just so I have lots of things to look at. This yellow page, I found a company that sells little tiny test bottles. So these are just from little ones. I don't have full bottles, which is why I haven't used much of that. And then here's the ones that I created for the Bombay inks. And you can see there's no white dots anywhere. There's no reaction like there were for some of the other inks. Now, this is one of the cards that I showed you recently in my holiday inspiration. I thought I would try something fun with a sky. In this card, she used watercolors with perfect pearls in that background instead of using salt to create some kind of texture. And I don't have any perfect pearls. I was really bummed. I thought I had some. I used to years ago. And apparently, in a big purge, I must have gotten rid of them thinking, I don't know what to do with these. I want to hand them off. So I think I gave them away. But I had a scrap of paper, so I thought I'll try this and see. I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to do a big epic kind of sky. So I sprayed water on it so I would get some uneven type of water on it. And I also dripped some on with a brush so I'd get some dropy areas and would have different amounts of the water so that the inks could react. Inks are stronger in color than watercolors. So you're going to get more powerful color. It's the difference between the watercolor pencils, when they're not really watercolor, they're ink pencils versus regular watercolor pencils. You get stronger color when you've got inks, but they also stain. They don't lift. So there's benefits to either one, but for different reasons. So that's why I'm getting this really strong bright color. And it's generally going to stay strong and bright, whereas watercolors tend to dry back to 30% of the strength of color, and they dry back less intense. They're more desaturated. So I've put two of the inks here on the paper and decided to see, since I know that it reacts a little bit with bleach, I thought I'd drip some bleach into it and see if I could lighten slash brighten some of the color, see what would happen there, and let some of that flow go across, because I liked the flow in the background on that card. So just sort of tried to see what would happen. It didn't really do much. You can see it. There wasn't a whole lot of reaction. There's a few flowing lines. And then I thought, well, she was trying to use the perfect pearls to mimic salt. So I'm going to try salt and see what happens with the salt. And I put it on unevenly. I tend to do that just because I'm a klutz at pouring out things evenly. So I've got a big bloop in one area, lighter areas where I sprinkled it. And with salt, you want to wait until it's good and dry before you start moving it off of there. So while it was busy drying, and you can see it's getting some nice texture, I grabbed a stamp set that's new from Sunny Studios Stamps. It's one of the cute polar bears. And I decided to paint them using the inks as well. But knowing that these inks are going to really quickly dry the edges. You're not going to get really soft edges unless you do it right away while it's wet. I also wanted to be able to water out the color. And this is a sepia color that I'm using because these are polar bears. I wanted it to be really pale. And I needed to mix it with water. So I just did that on the freezer paper that I was working on. Because when I get big and messy, I put out freezer paper because I am a slob. And I'd rather have freezer paper than mats because freezer paper I can just, after it's all done, crumble it up and throw it out. But I was also able to wipe this down with alcohol and remove some of the inks. So I could recycle the paper and use it for another project background again. I painted the scarves and sweaters in the aqua and struggled a little bit trying to get a dark versus a light side to them. But fortunately with all of this, I was not really worried about trying to stay in lines. Because that made life a lot easier. There are dyes that go with this. And if you use the dyes, which will make the next fussy-cutting step unnecessary, then you would need to stay in the lines a little bit better. And I find this is a little easier to just throw some color on there and let her rip. I use my detail scissors to trim out the edges. Moving the paper rather than the scissors I find is a little bit easier way to go. And there we go. All the images cut out and ready to add to cards. The background I thought was all dry. So I started rubbing off the salt and there's one area on the right that wasn't as dry, but everything else worked really well. And it's just a matter of rubbing it very gently. You can do it with a paper towel or with your hand. Paper towel gets kind of pilly. And there's little stuff that flicks off of it. But you can see here that on one section where I had the thick salt, it worked well. But over here on the right, when I moved the salt off before it was completely dry, it got a little cloudy in that area. But I was able to take those backgrounds and trim them down to make cards. And you can make a giant sheet like that with all kinds of backgrounds that you can use later for cards. So it's kind of a fun exercise to do, especially since it takes a while to dry. The snow was made by just taking card stock and tearing it and making one or two hillsides for each one of the snowy scenes. And put the trees in this one with the trees kind of standing down into the snow and each one has a moon that was just simply die cut out of some white card stock as well. To keep these simple and beautiful and featuring the gorgeous backgrounds. So try the background with your watercolors. You can make some inked backgrounds and see if salt works with the inks that you have. Lots of fun that you can have with this kind of an idea. And I will see you again next time with my next video.