 Well, hi there. I'm Sandy Olnok, artist and crafter here on YouTube and I have a painting as well as some free digis to give you today. Today's project is pretty much unlike anything that I've done here on YouTube before, but what else is new? I have two inks. One is from Faber Castell and the other is from Mont Blanc and they're both black inks and I have some bleach handy and I'm painting the surface of my watercolor paper first with water just so that my ink will move and I'm going to paint strips of each of these two blacks onto the paper. These two inks have particular properties that I learned from Nick Stewart's class on Udemy as well as on Nick's blog. Some of these inks were maybe in the class, I don't remember which ones I found from the class and which ones from his blog, but he swatches like every ink that's out there so you can see which ones have these chromatography properties because that's the thing that he's really good at and doing all kinds of paintings based on the serendipitous properties of the way these inks act with bleach in particular and it was just so fascinating. So I am going to take the bleach with a pipette and drop it into all of this wet ink. One of these inks goes toward the yellow side, the other goes towards a turquoise blue and it was really really fun to see. The yellowish one is the Faber Castel, the blueish one is the Mystery Black from Mont Blanc and I put probably too much bleach on this because it all started going away and I decided then to go back and paint some more in but you can keep going back and forth like that. I don't know at what point the bleach will kill off your watercolor paper. I haven't played it with it enough to know but I still had fun doing it. Even where I was painting the black ink into the bleached areas it was making sort of like a brown color instead of a black color when the ink got thin. It was just really neat to see how it has so many different levels of each color that it would pull out and you can tilt it, let the colors run, etc. I wanted to have a little more of that golden color at the horizon line where the sun would be so I took the ink, the Faber Castel that I knew was going to go toward the yellow, painted more of it, notice put more black ink down and then dropped the bleach back in so it would pull out the yellow color. Just fascinating how this stuff happens. I was absolutely enraptured watching this and then I, he'd said the whole thing because I wanted to put a cityscape on top of it. As we're in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic I have been thinking a lot about New York City and many of the cities that are currently undergoing such hardship and trauma and sickness and death and thinking about the first responders who were there and with New York being under attack from all of this especially I used to live in New York, I still know people there. I just wanted to do a piece to honor them and honor the city so I have created a skyline by painting in some blocks of black in the two inks that I've already used and I just made blobs so that I could then go in with my Twizby Eco Pen and some waterproof ink and start to add in some details because I wasn't sure if I was going to do anything beyond that was I going to end up you know throwing any water on this or more bleach so I wanted to make sure that at least those outlines stayed nice and firm. But then I got out a glass pan. I started to collect these because they're so pretty and a glass pan you can dip into something. I'm dipping it into bleach. This particular glass pan was sent to me by one of my subscribers so thank you very much for that Beth it was very nice gift to get in the mail and this one I'm just dipping into the bleach and drawing with it and you can see the colors of those two inks are coming out so when I painted those areas with both black inks it gives me a kind of nice rotation of the same colors in the drawing down below. It's just fascinating watching the lines appear out of black. It's just really fun. A glass pan is really inexpensive and if you have inks and various things you can even use like reinkers from your ink pads and things all different kinds of things that you can draw with you can even draw with coffee pick up one of these pens to do it with and you don't have to have a fountain pen to fill you just dip this into whatever it is and I'll be talking about fountain pens more in the future because I've been doing a lot more fountain pen work but I thought this would be a really fun project to share and especially in this time that we're in and for me something like this is therapeutic when I'm in times of anxiety and fear or sadness creating a piece that has a mood in an atmosphere like this helps me to work out some of that by expressing it on a piece of paper and even though this feels very ominous it also has a lot of beauty to it and I really enjoyed the process of making this and the delight of the reaction of the colors but also what it says if you would like to do a little something about the time we're in right now I have some free digis available to you you can download them one is an urban and one is a suburban type of landscape you can make cards out of them you can color them as coloring pages you can take them to a neighbor who's a shut-in who might need a little encouragement color one up and make a card or send them to your grandma who's having trouble staying home thanks so much all the links to the supplies and the freebies are in the doobly-doo and over on the blog and I'll see you again soon