I have a bunch of tips for you on display from my monthly "on my work table" collection:
1. Make-up removal wipes are removing ink from my fingers much better than just paper towels or even wet wipes. I am not sure what is in them and I stumbled into this solution by accident - but the results are in: if you need presentable fingers after an ink incident (or a regular painting outing in my case) - make-up removal wipes are quite useful!
2. I got an ink bottle gifted to me - and for a few days, I tried opening it with the regular tools (soaking in water, intensive cursing, and a rubber sheet wrapped around the cover). However, I saw that Andrew James was using hot water to open his watercolor tubes and decided to give it a go - worked like a charm: just pour hot water on the lid!
3. Over the years I collected a wonderful range of pencils from different manufacturers. But choosing which ones to use when I see them all in one place is a task that takes up too much of my willpower. So my solution is: I make a palette of 3-10 pencils and carry them for a few days, and then I change them up. The trick is to make the choice super quickly and then live with those choices and use whatever colors you have - but use them actively. And then - when you look at the results of what you did - ask what worked, what did not, what colors you missed, and which ones you want to keep in the next set. Also - keep rotating through them all - so many new color combos are in store!
4. Gouache - both traditional and acrylic - is quite expensive. But there are some colors you might be using way more than others - a good example is permanent white. For me, it is also golden ochre and ultramarine :) Getting a larger bottle for those "high use" colors will save you some money - for example, Schmincke has 250 ml bottles.
That's it for now - illustrations to all of these and more are in the image below! Feel free to drop me a line with your solutions to these problems (and secret tricks in general!)
Oh!!!! You are experimenting with oil pastels! Can’t wait to hear your take on them for sketching outside. I use the hot water trick very often for opening my tubes, it has saved many of them. Re gouache, I have started using it as watercolor, so quite diluted, and I like it much better that way. I also am starting to use more a more often Acrylics on the go, but I use markers and I limit it to 2, 3 colors max. Acrylagouache sounds very interesting but I should not start that too…
ReplyDeletewow - you are experimenting as well! I will report on my oil pastels soon - there are many experiments though and some are much more successful than others ;)
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