Ink Work

I love hot press watercolor paper. I have probably said this before, but because of the work I have been doing in the past few days I want to say it again. I know it is expensive, well relatively. But it is so smooth, takes ink so well, you can get it wet and not warp the paper excessively. For what I have been working on it is the perfect paper.  The only drawback other than cost is that you almost need to have access to a real art supply store to find it. Most watercolor papers sold at stores like A.C. Moore or Michaels are cold press paper and have a rough surface. Hot Press paper is almost as smooth as Bristol board, but the surface is a bit softer. Because of the smooth surface work extremely well on it.

The above bookmark is done on Hot Press watercolor paper. I used my technical pens to draw the black bits and on this piece I used my watercolor pencils to add color. The watercolor pencils were first used on the paper dry as I would use a regular colored pencil, then I added water by using a wet brush. I did go over the blue areas while they were damp with the watercolor pencil to add more color. Even so it doesn't show up as being very blue in the scan. The lettering I did by hand between ruled lines. I did use Microsoft Word to print out the word "Bookmark" using various fonts, picking the font I liked best to actually use.

The piece above is also on Hot Press water color paper. It is kind of a Zentangle, though not quite. It started life as a Zentangle but somewhere along the way I morphed it into something else, or at least I consider it something else. The black was done using my technical pens and in this case the color was added by using Inktense pencils and a brush dipped in water. I call it Mystic City. It is fairly small only four inches square. I think I will be doing some more works at this size, it is large enough to allow some details, but still small enough to be fairly quick to do. 

That is it for today. We have a new FFFC challenge this one is to use Trompe L'oeil techniques on an art quilt. I haven't yet had a chance to check out all the links that have been provided, but will hopefully get to that tomorrow then I can start to think about what I would like to do. I didn't work on the last challenge, too busy with the holidays, but this one sounds like fun.

My last comment is about the weather. I don't know what it has been like where you are, but here in MA we are suffering a surfeit of snow. We have had weekly snow storms for the past 3 weeks, each storm seems to be bringing us at least 10 inches of snow, this is not to mention the small storms that drop only an inch or two that seem to happen between the major storms. Combine this with cold temps and no melting are resulting in huge snow piles with narrow streets. The part that concerns me is that it is still only January. This is not typical weather for us here in Southeastern MA. I am crossing my fingers that we get a week long thaw soon. 

I was out today visiting one of my local parks making some photographs, they aren't wonderful, as there wasn't much sun,  but I will post one here with additonal ones on my Facebook Page. This isn't my personal page but a Fan page, you don't need to be a friend to view it. There is a link to the Fan page at the bottom of the blog. The above photo was taken at Houghton Pond and shows the pile of snow at the trail head that goes around the pond.  Per usual comments are always welcome.