 Hello there, I'm Sandy Olnok. Welcome to my YouTube channel. This is the second of my Ferris Wheel Press videos for this week. And I'm going to be showing you a project that is not an unboxing. The unboxing was in my last video. So if you like unboxings, go see that one. I'll show you how I swatched my colors and the way that I test them. And then there's a crazy test project that I created because I wanted to exploit the properties in the aurorialis ink. Because that was pretty spectacular, don't you think? However, in this video, I'm going to do one painting that has all three inks in it. And it's going to feature this lovely Sherry Sonata. And it is a lovely pink. I'm going to mix it with the aurorialis purple and the knitted nettle turquoise. So let's get started, shall we? So I began my painting wanting to experiment with Sherry Sonata, the ink from Ferris Wheel Press that starts out as a bit of a brick color and then it sort of turns into a very pale pink when you water it out enough. You have to water it out a lot. So I put some into a little dish so that I could mix the ink with water as well as putting plenty of water on the paper so that I could actually turn this into something that was not going to be a brick red type of flamingo because the flamingo picture that I was using as a reference from Paint My Photo, which I will link in the doobly-doo down below in case you want to try this, that flamingo is very, very pale and I wanted to make sure that I got that paleness. And one of the things I find really interesting about this color and there's a lot of properties in ink that are completely different than watercolor. I'm used to a color that's going to be brick in watercolor when you water it out. It's just going to be a very pale brick. You don't usually get a color shift and here it turns into a cooler pink as it gets lighter and it's just a brighter pink. So it was just kind of interesting to see what the ink does versus what my brain tells me would happen with watercolor. I'm going to be putting some pinks all over the beak so I just painted right through them. But the first pass on this, I considered it a watercolor in my head. I just made sure that I got all of that nice lush, really pale pink all over the bird itself first. And then I started using a dip pen to do the drawing with. Now a dip pen is a pen that you dip into the ink bottle. You don't need to actually put ink into it. A lot of the fountain pens that I use have a cartridge in them and you have to actually change the ink out. I was going to have to change ink all the time with this so it made more sense to use a dip pen. However, my glass dip pen died. I did try to use it in my previous video but just barely survived with it. And when I say my glass pen died, the tip of it broke so I had this really sharp scratchy nib on it and that's why it didn't work so I had to toss it but I'll have to order me a new one. But that got me to get this pen out. Now this was one that I, oh gosh, I bought it ages ago. I can't even remember where. And it came with a bunch of calligraphy nibs so I'm using calligraphy nibs here because I can't find the other nibs that I have. I need to do something about that because if I'm going to be working with inks more as someone who's working with Ferris wheel press, probably would like to switch back and forth between inks a lot more. Now this color is actually the auroraealis which is a purple color. And what I did here, I had tested on a sketch in my sketchbook. A technique that I wanted to try because I wanted these colors to mix but every time I dropped wet color into wet color it would just bleed like crazy everywhere. And I wanted to have some more control. So what I'm doing here is putting the ink down in places where I can have control over it. There's that long line where the beak opens around the center of the entire beak. And I wanted that part to be really dark. And I still wanted it to blend with everything but I wanted the color to stay put a little more than just dropping in color. And you'll see how that plays out. So I started with the purple color this deep purple that you saw in the last video if you were around and watched that one. And then I'm going to mix that with some more of the sherry sonata. And that's going to give me more sherry sonata to mix into the beak because I want the beak to be really strong in color. Even stronger than in the reference photo it's a little bit lighter than what I'm going to come out with. But I wanted to have that contrast so it would make the flamingo itself really pop by having extra contrast in it. So I'm just scribbling color in here because I know from testing that these colors are going to water out really well which means I'm not going to end up with a bunch of scribbly lines in there necessarily if I don't want them because I'm going to be able to just kind of push things around and water is going to melt out the color really nicely. So just using my nice big brush to go over the inks that are here so it's turning them into movable ink and then just kind of playing around with how those edges work out kind of blending toward each other. That white line down the center of the beak is one that kind of comes and goes a little bit in the photo. It gets a little darker at one end so I just let my brush travel over it just kind of having some fun watching the ink move and then any time I didn't want to drag extra color around I just rinsed my brush. I got back to my little bowl and could start then dipping my ink into it to make some slightly thicker Seri Sonata ink so I could get the top of the beak to be one color and the bottom another because that's kind of what the picture indicates. I think it's a greater flamingo I think I'm not really sure. I don't know my flamingos very well and I did try kind of generally doing a search to see what kind of flamingo it was and I couldn't really tell but mine's just a sandy flamingo and that's just what I'm going to call it. So I'm working with some very thin pigment and even though it looks like that brick color in the bowl when I'm using it very lightly I'm hoping it's going to stay nice and pale because I want to put a bunch of feathers into the bird and I want to just work really softly with it and I just was kind of working here to gauge exactly how much pigment do I want to have in there. So once that was dry I wet the entire background area because I wanted to try the knitted nettle which is that turquoise color because I did want to see if I could do one painting with all three colors in it. So it was kind of exciting to see that I came up with that idea and figured out what I could paint that had all three elements in it. Put a whole bunch of water in it and some very thin pigment to start with. Because I wasn't sure if I wanted that to be really dark or if I wanted it to be really pale and the beak to be the only dark portion of it but you can see how dirty my water got really quickly because ink is just really really strong as I talked about in the last video. Inks are much stronger in pigment than watercolors and they also have different properties of lifting so don't expect them to act the same all the time but they will tend to move in similar kinds of ways that you might be used to in watercolor. So I did add some color to it. I wanted it to kind of snug up to the edge of my bird's head so I just kind of tilted the board to get the color to move so I was trying to stay away from having like the wet pigment touch the dark beak. If per chance you touch some wet ink that you're putting on the page to a wet area it's going to just immediately run into that area. With watercolor sometimes it will stay because you can control that a little bit by having the color you're applying be thicker than the color that's already on the paper. With ink it's a little more dangerous to touch areas next to each other. And being careful with how you produce your edges is important because it's really easy to make a mistake. You will see one of mine in all its glory in just a minute here. But I was trying to decide I wanted to have a bunch of ink work showing on the beak in the finished piece or if I was going to use my brush and melt all that out again or not. Because when I did wash over everything it did get a little bit on the kind of blended side and I wanted a bit more detail in there. So as I started working toward this little corner here I did that. Let me instant replay it for you. This was when I squealed and went oh no. Because all of that ink just went running right into the corner here where that paper was wet. So I stopped the camera immediately. I dried it really well so I could then start to put some more color into the turquoise. Oh my gosh I thought okay well now I know at least what I'm going to do with that background. It's going to get darker because I have to cover that purple that went awry. So I started just kind of making little blobs of color with some scribbles. And again I wasn't sure if I wanted to leave the scribbles and let that be a texture in the background or if I was going to blend it all out. So you can see kind of the craziness of what I was doing with my line work. The further I got doing this I decided this was going to be an ink painting not a pen and ink type of drawing with all that line work. So I took some water and just went over the entire area. I put some in another dish so I could add more color to certain sections. I just played around with it until I melted out a bunch of those areas of the pen and ink work. But it did hide that purple blob and that was the goal. So there we go. Got that nice and dry this time and did not allow it to move again. But I also decided what I wanted to do was make this almost a bokeh type of design. The tests that I had run on my little swatch cards showed that there was a little lifting of the ink when I applied water to it. And not a whole lot but a little bit. And I think it was just enough to make that interesting so that it was not going to be fighting with the bird. Because some inks if they get too bright with the bokeh it can look really weird. So I kind of liked what happened there after all. I love serendipity in art where things just kind of happen and you're forced to make different choices and somehow sometimes it just works. So then I got a small brush and just started working on using thinner and thinner ink as I worked my way up to the highlight side of the flamingo so that it would just get more and more pale. And I followed the feathers all the way around the head. So they would curve when they came down to the other side. There is a nice shadow on this section of the neck as it turns and makes that turn around the other direction. And then just used a small brush to start dragging those feather lines out and joining those so it doesn't look like a big blob. It did leave me with a couple of blobs that were going to need another layer of detail to be put into them. But that was perfectly okay because I'm very used to that with watercolor. In some sections I would switch to my large brush and then just finish off the edges of them so they would slowly trail out with more detail in them as they worked their way across the body of the bird. So once that was all done and dry, then I mixed up just slightly thicker and darker pigment into my little dish so I could start painting more of those same shape feathers but breaking up those big darker sections with smaller and smaller details of the ink which kind of gave it that consistency of the texture even though the color was getting darker as that shadow kind of appeared across there. When I finished this painting I was so tickled with myself not only because I didn't freak out completely, okay well I freaked out some when I had my ink blue but I figured out how to fix it. I did achieve a little bit of the shimmer. There's not a whole lot there. You can just barely see it on camera. I can see it much more in person. But I used all three inks and I didn't paint every square inch of the piece of paper. There were some areas that I just let them be what they are and it was fun. It was just a really fun project to work on. So I hope you have enjoyed this and if you did and you want some inks of your very own and I have a deal for you go to ferriswheelpress.com and get yourself 10% off anything there. You can get the inks that I'm using or you can get something else and use the code ALLNOC to get your 10% off because I'd love for you to get a discount. That would be awesome and amazing and I will see you again in another video next week. I hope you enjoyed this one. If you did tap the like button, that big old thumbs up. Share it with a friend who loves inks so they can get 10% off too. And I will see you guys later on. Bye bye.