I love the color blue.
You can see that in my work pretty easily. Most everything has some blue in it somewhere, and when I try really, really hard to stay away from the same old, same old blue, blue, blue – the piece rarely looks right.
I actually love all colors – as long as they are blue.
With alcohol inks, the blue choices all seem to do exactly what I want them to do – look spectacular. They are stunning by themselves, yet blend beautifully with other blues. They are even friendly to other colors – especially greens and roses.
Yellow takes over and white blends into the color it’s added to so that there is no longer white but a lighter shade of that color. Black covers everything while indigo separates into pigments and reveals several different colors when it dries. Of course, indigo is a blue and it’s going to be cooperative and do wonderful alcohol inky things.
So the blues and greens and purples blend so nicely and leave you with layers and shades of themselves – without a whole lot of work.
Having said that, if you move over to the oranges and paler colors you won’t necessarily get a paler result. Diluting the inks with alcohol (we’ll talk about that later in another blog) gives you lighter, paler color to work with, but the lighter caramels and gingers aren’t necessarily going to act like my beloved blues. Sometimes they just sit there and don’t want to play with the other colors. Sometimes they blend just fine and voila! you’ve got what you were looking for.
The corals and watermelons and flamingos? – sheer delight. Cooperative, vibrant, and show-stoppers. Whenever I feel that a design needs some subtle changes – maybe some brightening, maybe some mystery – I reach for coral first and almost always have the lighter feeling I am looking for.
So much more to talk about with color – and shading – and pigments – and how to see the colors – either individually on their own merit or the effect they have in the mix with the other colors. But we have plenty of time to chat about this and most anything else.
If there is something you would like me to address in a future blog, please contact me and I’ll turn my attention to your request.
Please go back to my ART section and just scroll through to get a color high!
Enjoy – Lynne