 Hello and welcome to my YouTube channel. My name is Sandy Almak. I'm an artist. I work in all kinds of mediums on all kinds of subject matters and all kinds of projects. And no matter what you create or what you want to create, you are welcome here on my channel. So I'm glad you're here. Subscribe if you haven't. If you have any questions about this video or any other videos that I put out over a number of years, ask your questions in the comments on any one of them. I still read them to this day on very old videos. Now today's video, I want to talk about inks in specifics and inks that have shimmer in them and how you can get them to shimmer more. But before I get to that, I want to have a little conversation about community and tell you a story that's kind of a funny one. But if you would like to just get to the art parts and you don't really want to listen to me yammer on, then you can click at this timestamp and go watch just the art section. You're here to hang out with me for a few minutes and let's have a little chat. My recent thoughts about community actually start with a haircut. Bear with me. It's a little journey to get there. But I was at the hospital with Mom a couple weeks ago. It was middle of the afternoon and she wanted to rest. She wanted a nap. She said, why don't you go find something to do? And I thought, oh, I'll get my haircut. And I googled for a local place and I walked in and said, does anybody have time for a haircut today? And the young lady gestured to a gentleman, a young man. So I sat down in his chair. He put the apron around me and I said, you know, I just celebrated my 60th birthday and I think it's time for a change. I would like shoulder length hair. Notice my shoulders are here and my hair is still here. Okay. But while he was, you know, doing that thing they always do, they lift up your hair. I'm not sure what is up with that. But while he was doing that, he said, oh, so you just turned 60. You're old. And I guessed someone his age. I guess I'm old. Some days I feel older than others. But I said, yeah. And he said, well, can I ask you something? I don't know where this is going, but okay. And he asked me, why should I vote? Now, before you worry that I'm going to get political here, hold on. I'm just going to tell you about the conversation, not politics. I could have just dove right in and said, you know, it's all about democracy. It's all about your vote mattering and your civic duty and blah, blah, blah. Or I could have told him all about the candidate I support and why you should vote for that person could have said a lot of stuff. And I didn't. What I did instead was ask him questions. I asked what issues were important to him. What's his life like? And what are his problems that he's facing? I learned a lot about him. He asked questions from me, and I told him about my life. We are from very different places, very different walks in life. We have very different issues. But then we got around to talking about which candidate was going to be better on one issue or another and how you weigh those and whether it matters at all. And I'm one who believes that it does matter. So I came down on that side, but by the time we were finished, he actually said he was going to vote because he could see the value in it. Now, I tell you that conversation not to tell you to go out and talk politics. I do recommend asking questions instead of pontificating at each other. Maybe we'd all get along better if we could learn to do that. But I walked away from this conversation feeling ridiculously good about humanity at that moment. And what I realized is that it showed me how much I miss community. And not just like people to talk politics with necessarily, that's not what I'm really meaning, but finding a way to talk with people that makes connections. And it brings us together in some way. I truly ended up liking this young man so much by the time I was done. I really did. I don't know what he thought about me, but I liked him a lot. And I want more of that kind of getting to know people in my life where I want that conversation is about art. I want to talk about our hearts as artists more. And maybe I need to do more of that on my channel here. I will make an effort at that. But I also want to find better places to do that. I watched recently a video of the South by Southwest speech by Jack Conte. And I'll link it in the doobly-doo if you want to watch it. It's 45 minutes long, so it's a little bit long. But he talks about the transformation of social media and how the internet started out with only one way sharing. So we could read things, but we weren't really, there weren't places for us to upload our own stuff. And then came social media where we could upload our own creations, our own artwork and get feedback on it. And we could find our tribe. They had this follow button and a subscribe button. And it was cool because then our tribe was together. The people who like our work as artists, they had opted in. And then the social media companies needed to figure out how to somehow make a living at these companies because they were losing money at the beginning. And they discovered algorithms and how they could promote things that would keep people on the site, keep them there and interested. But it became stuff that artists weren't benefiting from because what was happening is the follower model, that whole idea of subscribing to someone's work started to break down because now our followers and our subscribers see very little of what we produce. And Jack goes into this in a whole lot of detail, but it's an interesting thought process to go through and to figure out how I can contribute better to building community. I've tried it in a couple places and sometimes I'm more successful than others. One of which is Patreon, where I've had some success with it because there are some of you who have chosen, God bless you, to support my art by giving a little bit of finances every month. That means a whole lot to me. And I just love you all. My patrons, you're great, but I don't know what it is about Patreon, whether it's the platform, whether it's the app, whether it's just that you don't want to check in on one more place to see what I'm up to or whether you just don't have notifications on. I don't really know, but I know the conversation there is not what I would like it to be. I want it to be better than that. And I'm going to try to figure out what I can do to make more of an effort. And those who are patrons this coming weekend, I'm going to talk about that a bit and put a longer video out about this topic for you guys to discuss with me. There's also a free option to free subscribe to Patreon, but I'm going to try to make that post with that video public for even the free people to subscribe to. So if you want to hear more on this, I will put that out there. Now, one of the other places that I have found community in, and in the last couple of weeks especially, was Art Venture. It's my community on mighty networks. Boy, the ones who are posting their artwork and commenting on the work of others and just communicating with each other, they were my lifeline while I was at home with Mom taking care of her. Because there's only so much you can talk to your family about when it comes to maybe your real feelings and how you're processing things because my sisters and I look at the world differently. And I just needed a place to like vent, this is what's going on with me right now. This is how I'm feeling. And at Art Venture, I was able to do that. There's a text chat option on the homepage. It made a world of difference to me. I could go in and just post a heartbroken emoji. That's it. And they would know I needed a little TLC and they would leave all kinds of wonderful encouragement. And it's because we know each other. We're not just like Instagram fellow followers who slide right past each other's work. We have had long, deep conversations about our art, about our lives. And they got me through a lot of what I've been through in the last couple of weeks. And then the other one that I've been putting a little more energy into, I'm writing longer newsletters now. I don't know how long that will continue and whether or not that's going to be an ongoing thing. But the reactions that I've gotten from subscribers to that have been amazing. And I just want to say thank you to all of those people who wrote back to me and told me their stories of dealing with their parents, aging and, you know, end of life issues and all that sort of thing. It's all made me feel like I'm not alone in this. And not that I ever thought I was the only one dealing with aging parents. But it really helps to know that other people have been there. And it's not just me being crazy here and, you know, breaking out into tears at the drop of a hat. So I just want to say thank you to all of you subscribers as well. You all are not getting to interact with each other. You're just getting to interact with me. And I would love to see more of that whole community interacting. And on Patreon and on ArtVenture, those are kind of the two places that are going to be driving that for me as I start to dive into this more. On ArtVenture, we're going to do a Zoom call on Friday night. If you're not part of ArtVenture and you're like against being part of ArtVenture, don't want to download the app, you can just email me and tell me you'd like the Zoom link. What we do at our open studio is just hang out together. We make art whatever we're working on. We can show it or not show it depending on how we feel. And we just talk about what's going on in our lives. We ask questions about art. We say, I've got this new art supply. What do I do with it? We just talk about all different kinds of things and we build community. And that's what I really want to focus on going forward because no matter what's going on, if I have community, if I have people that I can really connect with, that's going to make all the rest of that easier and give me more motivation to keep putting one foot in front of the other. So I invite you to be part of my community. I'll put links to all these things in the doobly-doo if you want to check any of that out. I want to get on to talking about the art stuff. So let's get busy talking about ink. This month's care package from Ferris Wheel Press included three items. First is a bottle of Dancing Time ink. And this box had a little issue. I got some nail polish on the front of it. Tried removing it with nail polish remover and it took off the gold ink. That was a little weird. But the Dancing Time ink is kind of a desaturated green color and I'll swatch them out for you so you can see it. But I just love their bottles. I love their packaging. They have hexagon lids on most of them. They have lots of gold. I mean just beautifully done. Very, very nicely put together. I just love good packaging as a recovering graphic designer. The second ink that they sent is called Emerald Gardens and this is the one that has shimmer. It has a duochrome to it. And one of the things you'll notice any inks that you have that have a duochrome have like a shimmer that collected in the bottom. And you do need to shake it up. And one of the things that I've discovered is that I always thought okay once you shake it, you don't have to shake it again immediately. Well we're going to find out a little bit differently in the rest of this video. The third item they sent is a ballpoint pen that came in this incredible box. Like this is going to be my, tuck it in my bag and put all my brushes in it when I go out planer painting because it's kind of cool. They have it stuck to a piece of cardboard that'll come out. But the ballpoint pen is really nice. It's, I think it's made of copper from what I read and covered in lacquer has a gold end on it that has a little, you can tie a, tie a string onto it. So if you wear pens around your neck, I guess you could do that. But you turn the gold handle at the end and that's what brings out the tip for the ballpoint. And this is filled with waterproof ink, which I didn't realize you could make a pen with waterproof ink. But I'll show you that in a few minutes. Now to swatch these colors, I'm using watercolor paper, just putting water down on them first so that there's the papers nice and wet and then adding a bit of the color at the top and want it to have enough ink that it will travel down through the water because some inks, not these, but some inks will change as they thin out. And what I like to do is on my swatch cards, I want to know what it's like when it's solid and I want to know what it's like when it starts kind of melting into water. And then I also test it with bleach, which I'll show you in a second as well. So that one is the desaturated one, the dancing time in the larger bottle, the smaller bottle. I'm going to shake it up before I get going so that it's got lots of that gold shimmer floating around in the water or in the liquid in the ink. And if you wait too long, that stuff is going to settle at the bottom. But boy, if you get it right away immediately, right out of the bottle while that gold is just swimming around, you will end up with a lot of that shimmer on the paper. And when you're painting with it like this, you're using a brush, the brush is just going to suck up a lot of that nice, yummy shimmer and dump it onto your paper. And so my swatches came out gorgeous. Hopefully you can see all that shimmer on the emerald on the right hand side. Just for fun, I always test them with bleach as well, because there are some inks that do a major reactive thing with bleach. Some don't react with bleach at all. And some will react when everything is all wet and moving around, but not when it's dry and solid. So there's a lot of different tests you could run. But a lot of inks, you just get basically a lighter color, like all the greens tend to turn into a light blue. So they're maybe not as reactive as some of them. Like there's one black ink that turns gold when you hit it with bleach and stuff. But you can do lots of different tests. Here, I just took a little scrap to use very, very wet ink and drop liquid bleach into it and see what happens there. And just see what, you know, as I swirl the ink and the bleach together, I can get kind of different color variations. So you can play around with that with all different kinds of inks and save these kind of little test things in a sheet protector so that you remember what you tested and don't have to test it every time you're going to do a project. I also did a little card. I know it's not ink necessarily, but I did a little card with the scribe pen so that I could write down these details for myself and remember what I learned about it. But it is a ballpoint pen and you can draw with a ballpoint pen. I have a drawing underway that I'm going to post on social later on this week when I get it finished. But like you could take water to it and I was really shocked that it didn't go anywhere. Now it does take a little bit longer to dry so your finger can still smush it like it can with any ballpoint pen. But once it's dry, it was nice and waterproof. So I've got them in my sheet protector and I'll put them in my book with all my inks. Then I decided I would do a drawing in my hexagon sketchbook and I will apologize. The people that watched my previous hexagon sketchbook video, I had drawn a nest on the first page and I said, oh yeah, I'm going to put a link to the sketchbook in the supply list. And then when I went to look for the link, the company has left Etsy. I was so bummed. So I don't know where you could get this sketchbook, but God bless them for still making them when I purchased mine because I like having a unique shape for a sketchbook. The drawing that I'm doing is just going to be trees and I wanted to just sketch in the basic shapes of the tree trunks and there's a path in it. So I just wanted to give myself the general outlines of some of this, but I was thinking through how am I going to get this to shimmer? Because when you put ink into a pen, even if you've really mixed it up well and then inked your pen, it can settle in your pen a little bit. And what I had found on a drawing that I did with a different ink a while ago was that I think I let it sit too long in the shook up bottle because when I put it in the pen, there was no shimmer left at all, but you have to have enough of the ink on the paper to really get that shimmer to even show up. So if you have an ink pen that doesn't really pour out a lot of ink, if it's not like a really nice thick line, you probably won't see much in terms of the shimmer, but it also has to have the shimmer in the ink pen as well. So you have to have enough of it floating around in there, which sometimes means in between everything you do, like every brush stroke, you might need to stir up the ink bottle. It seems to me from just a little testing that I did, that some inks will the stuff settles on the bottom faster than others. And I don't know what causes that. I don't know if it's, you know, the ink itself, whatever. But in this particular case, I used a longer brush. It's a number four brush that has a, you know, longer tip to it than what I might otherwise have wanted to use here, because I wanted to get enough of that ink and I wanted to swirl around the ink in the bottle every time I went to redraw the ink out of it onto the brush. Because otherwise I was not picking up shimmer. So if you're finding that you have, you know, whenever you're creating and you bought this special shimmer ink for it and it didn't do any shimmering, it's because you didn't have enough of the mica that's floating around inside of it. You didn't have enough of that getting onto your brush into your pen and onto your paper. So for me, it was mostly just a matter of either reshaking the bottle in between different steps or just making sure I was using a brush that I could swirl it around with. Or if you're using a glass pen or something or a dip pen, you could swirl the ink around in between each one. But this particular ink, I just, I really needed to be swirling it all the time. And I'll show you at the end the shimmer, you'll be able to see it. But here I, the photograph that I was working from, from paint my photo, I will put a link to it in the doobly-doo in case you want to try it. Yeah, okay. That's another thing that's going to be linked in the doobly-doo. But the photo has a path going out to the beach and then has all these trees. So I started by trying to make the tree trunks and the bushes with that nice heavier shimmer using the brush and then started going in with my pens. Now I loaded up a Twizby Eco because the Twizby Eco really puts out ink. I mean, it just like pours it out nicely onto the paper unlike a lot of my other pens. And I wanted to be able to use those and I made sure I sucked the shimmer into the pens to see how much of it would come out in the drawing itself. Not a lot did. So unless I was drawing, you know, some of the tree trunks I drew with a medium nib, that had enough ink for it to really translate into being that, that gold shimmer. But a lot of the little leaves on the trees didn't do a whole lot because there was just not enough ink in enough congealed, I don't know what you'd call it, like enough mass for it to be shimmery. One of the other things I discovered is that the more you use bleach with inks that have any kind of mica in them, any bleach techniques are basically going to kill off the mica. You won't end up with a whole lot of the shimmer showing. But what I ended up doing with a lot of these was just using my thicker pen here. This is the medium nib and then using water along with it to soften out some of the color. And then in between, for the smaller details, I used fine nib. So I just kind of alternated between those so I could try to get all the textures that I wanted, that sort of thing in my sketch. The paper here is not optimal for pen and ink. It's just a mixed media paper in the sketchbook, but it's working good enough that I think the sketch is really coming together because I was trying to find a way to make sure that I got enough light values and dark values with a good range of mid-tones in between them so that the whole picture would kind of kind of hang together well. Now before we get to the end of this, I would like your opinion as well. I know I'm asking a lot in this video. I'd like your opinion on the music. Do you like having music in videos? Because I finally got my channel white listed, so I can add a little atmosphere, a little bit of tunes going on. So let me know what you think. There's the shimmer. That's not wet ink. That is shimmery on the surface, which is kind of nice. And I think my sketch held together quite nicely. Now I did purchase for myself a little rack that you saw at the beginning from my inks from Ferris Wheel Press. I wanted just one place to put them all together, so we'll see how this one grows over time. One more thing I'd like to get your opinion on before I go in this video. Every year I participate in Doodle Wash's World Watercolor Month. I'm an ambassador and any day now I'm going to get the urgent email from Charlie saying, where's the art for your pouch? Because we do zipper pouches and mugs every year with each of the ambassador's artwork on it. And last year I came really close to being the top seller, which means I raised almost the most money for charity. And this year I want to see if I can really nail it. So I did a special painting just for World Watercolor Month. And I would like to know if this is one that you think you might actually buy a zipper pouch or a mug with. Now it's on the easel back behind me, and I know you can't see that. So here is a closer view of it. On the left is my last video with the seal in it. But the tiger is one that I designed specifically for a pouch. So it has some empty space where we can put the logo. Usually I just pick something I've done in the last year. But this one I did just for this particular zipper pouch. And I want to know do you need something happier than like a serious tiger? Like does it need to be flowers? Because a lot of people do flowers. So I was looking for what I wanted to be my signature painting that's going to go out during World Watercolor Month. And that's what I came up with so far. But I still have a little bit of time I think to come up with something else. So let me know if you would purchase something with that tiger on it or not for that fundraiser in July. And if you are a watercolorist and you would like to get some practice painting with others and do it in community, the community at Art Venture has been this year starting to do classes together. So taking one of my classes and I do it as well. I redo my own homework assignments and we share our work in the same kind of general timeframe. We're going to be doing the branching out watercolor class. It's a level two class. If you haven't taken it, it's on sale right now. If you have taken it, you can just redo it along with us, which is what a lot of people will be doing. I'll be putting a link to branching out in the doobly-doo as well along with all those other links. It's going to be a link fest. Sorry about that. I've been talking a lot. I think I'm done. Let's get out there and create something every day. All right. I will see you again in my next video and maybe Friday night at the Zoom call. See you later. Bye.