There’s a chaos to watercolor that I love, an element of surprise every time that water and paint meet on paper. In past blogs I’ve experimented with different materials to increase the strange effects one can get in this fluid medium, but this week I’ve found a new favorite addition: Indian ink. The amazing watercolor artist Stephanie Law made a brief tutorial showing her discovery that a specific brand of Indian ink leaves behind grainy, beautiful, and endlessly unique textures when applied to watercolor paper. So, I purchased myself a bottle and spent this week experimenting.
According to Law’s tutorial, the Windsor & Newton brand of Indian ink (pictured above) is the best one she’s found for getting the really lovely grainy effect from the ink wash, and it certainly worked for me.
The basic method is this: you wet the desired areas of your paper with just water, then dip your brush into a mix of 1 part ink to 4 parts water and apply it to the wet ares. From here you can tilt the paper to allow the ink to disperse through the water. The effect is beautiful to watch, and you can begin to see the grains appearing immediately.
Here’s the dried result of the image above:
I experimented with using the ink wash on both hot and cold press paper, and found both to work equally well.
On this one below, I did a wash and then let it dry, then did another wash over the first layer. In the future I plan on adding layers upon layers to see what that ends up looking like.
Looking at these ink wash creations I see images, creatures, whole scenes, so I plan on painting over these background washes and seeing if I can bring out some of what I’m seeing. I’ll share the results here next week!
I’m super appreciative to artists like Stephanie Law who are kind enough to share their discoveries and techniques, and she’s definitely worth supporting and learning from via her Patreon account if you’re a watercolorist.
Compulsive Creation 