Mixing Custom Colors in Acrylic Paint Markers

I enjoy working with acrylic markers as a supportive media - meaning I rarely make a whole drawing with them but their opaqueness and willingness to cover whatever mess I already had on a page make me reach for them more often than not. Between my markers and markers I used for running classes I accumulated quite a collection of colors that were... "not that popular". And then I saw a video where Emma Carlisle was mixing some custom colors in acrylic pens and thought - why don't I try and do that with my existing box of "no way" colors from all sorts of brands? This experiment was quite a success and I got some requests to share my process for making some Custom Color Posca Markers - here it is:

Click on the image to see it larger - it should be readable :)

Drawn reports in the form of the portraits - war in Ukraine. May 14-20, 2023.

May 14-20, 2023. Days 445-452 of war.
This week my parents found some new routes around their new temporary home. Which lead to meeting new cats, dogs and discovering new plants. We talk about friends and family in Ukraine and outside, talk about how people are fearing, how they are making decisions, and finding ways to help each other. 

One of the conversations happened during the evening meal - so I got an unusual angle to draw. We talked about latkes and how the same dish is cooked in Ukraine and other countries and how they all have little different names. I brought up some of my new Ukrainian words and told them about vyshyvanka day - I got a new vyshyvanka and wore it to a meeting with friends :) 

Flanders Poppies on my mind

After last week's encounter with a field of Flanders Poppies, my mind was quite occupied with the ideas about depicting the folds and wrinkles, capturing light and transparency of the petals without losing either color or texture and at the end, I not only experimented with some cardboard cutouts, string, and paint printing options but also did some ink sketches of one flower that was drying on my table and then ended up back at the field for one more quick sketch at the location. 

Video flip-through my Sketchbook #148

I finished Sketchbook #148 quite some time ago and finally made a video of a flip through - it is below and on my youtube. Some screenshots are also below. 

This sketchbook started with my trip to Croatia to see my parents and their portraits of war in Ukraine are threaded through the sketchbook after that too. There are several outings to sketch with friends, lots of everyday life sketches, and of course, gouache and stencils.

This was a 8.3" x 5.1" Art Creation Sketchbook from Royal Talens which I kept from February 11, 2023 till April 11, 2023 and in these two months time it gained 160g of ink, paint, glue and paper!

Drawn reports in the form of the portraits - war in Ukraine. May 8-13, 2023.

May 8-13, 2023. Days 439-444 of war.

My parents did not talk about the WWII victory day this year - did not even mention it. It used to be a huge topic, but not anymore. All the conversations were around the latest bombings in Ukraine and the complicated situation in different regions, around their dear Kharkiv in particular. And around people - people who hold Ukraine together with their good deeds - every tiny thing helps.

I learned that cats still have no names but are differentiated by their color. It is important to mention that my parents disagree on the names of some colors so I cannot be sure if it was a blue cat or a gray-blue cat that boldly tried to get inside their apartment and hide under a blanket on the bed. But one of them did!

The subject of what people take with them when they run from the war is something I think about a lot. There was a short video by UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency that I saw several years ago. It is called "What They Took With Them" - where actors from around the globe read from the list of answers from refugees. When I saw this video first I remember that I was surprised by how many times I heard "home keys". Nothing on that list surprises me now. 

My Mom took her diary from the last two years with her. And she is illuminating me sometimes with little quotes and comparisons. This week she noted that they are definitely walking more now. But the density of life cannot be compared. She did not say anything else.