You asked, I deliver! Hello, and welcome back to Jenna Gets Creative. I got a few questions
on my Facebook page recently about mixing and using Dr. Ph Martin's Bombay India Inks
as a follow up to my review of those inks in a video last year. Shout out to Angie for
asking! So today I'm going to re-make my mixing chart with these inks, explain what I'm doing,
and give some tips. Anybody who's asked to see my mixing chart
up until now saw a crappy cell phone photo of this chart, and I guessed that when I made
the mixing chart I did my mixing directly on the paper, because that's how I used to
do it. Mixing squares on the top / right of diagonal were mixed with the top colour laid
down first, and the reverse is true on the bottom / left side. This time I'm actually
going to do my newer method, which I like I lot better, and that's to mix the colours
on a palette type surface and swatch both the one-to-one mixed colour and a water-diluted
version. So first things first, this is the Dr. Ph
Martin's Bombay India Inks, set #1, without the built in droppers. There are 12 inks in
this set, two of which are black and white, and I will not be including those in the main
mixing chart. If this were set #2, which is 12 additional colours, my mixing chart would
be a 12x12 grid instead of 10x10. I've labelled the colours in the same order from left to
right across the top and from top to bottom down the left hand side. The squares on the
top-left to bottom-right diagonal in the grid will all just be the pure colour, as that's
where the colours match up with themselves on the horizontal and vertical axes, so I
just go ahead and swatch the unmixed, undiluted inks there.
I swatched in my version of rainbow colour order for this set, treating "bright red"
like an orange and following it with magenta, and then slotted brown in at the very end.
You can certainly put your chart in whichever order you wish, and you can do the white and
black inks as well if you want. I will be doing some mixing with those in the second
part, so stay tuned for that, and I'll talk about why I'm not including them in the chart
at that point. Since red is the first colour on my chart,
I'm going to do all the red mixes first. I try my best to use as close to the same amount
of ink from each pair of colours I'm mixing as possible so that it's clear which of the
two colours overpowers the other if they don't mix super evenly. I find violet and brown
in this set are quite the little bullies in terms of overpowering the colour they're mixed
with. Every violet blend looks like a shade of purple, and only the greens and blue make
the brown look like anything other than a warm shade of brown.
For my diluted swatches, I dropped two drops of water into each blend on the palettes using
my brush for roughly the same dilution power every time. Don't worry about not having a
diluted swatch of the single colours; we'll also address that in part two.
Keep in mind when you're doing this sort of mixing chart and using it for your reference,
this is just a starting point. This is equal ratio two-colour blends only. You can always
try adding more of one colour than the other for different effects, or blend more than
two colours for even more new colours. Some of the blends with yellow and many of the
blends with brown start to look like skin tone options, but adding a third colour would
perfect them. Dilute your blue-teal mix until you have a nice cyan, and that can add nicely
to warm yellow ochre range yellow and brown mixes for light to medium skin tones, for
example. Also remember basic colour theory from the colour wheel. Colours directly across
from one another on the colour wheel are known as compliments. Mixing these colours evenly
will tend toward a brown shade, but giving just a little of one to the other will actually
darken it without muddying it. A little red added to green produces a darker green, and
a little green added to red produces a darker red.
While you watch me complete the rest of my mix chart, before we move on to part two,
I'd like to run through my list of related talking points I brain stormed. First, let's
talk about the inks themselves. These are, as the bottles say, pigmented India inks.
This means the colour comes from solid pigments, usually in a fine powder form, rather than
a liquid dye. The benefit is the high degree of lightfastness. The drawback is that the
pigment separates and sinks to the bottom faster than a dye-based ink. Don't worry too
much about this, it doesn't affect the colour of the ink from use to use or anything like
that, but you're pretty much guaranteed to find yourself needing to shake up the bottles
of ink before use many times before the bottles are used up. These inks do claim to be waterproof
once dry, so keep that in mind when working on mix media pieces. These aren't watercolour;
they won't reactivate or lift like watercolour, and they're not going to blend on the page
after starting to dry like watercolour can. Lightfastness is why I picked the Bombay India
Inks over the Hydrus watercolours, by the way, or any other popular competing brands'
liquid watercolours. Liquid watercolours tend to be dye-based, which also tends to mean
not lightfast. I also wanted to mention that when I received
these inks they were frozen, and they're perfectly fine. I ordered them through Amazon, and they
were delivered at a time when we still had snow on the ground here in Newfoundland. They
waited overnight in the big metal cubby hole community mail box on the side of the road,
so yeah, they froze. Just like paint, ink can freeze and thaw and be fine. Fortunately
there's enough space left in fresh, "full" bottles that expansion due to being frozen
didn't burst the bottles at all. I have no idea if the opposite situation would be true,
if they would be fine after being way too hot. This set without the built-in droppers
is in plastic bottles, so I imagine if they didn't get hot enough to melt the bottles,
they'd probably also be fine as long as they were sealed at the time so you could be sure
that they didn't lose any non-pigment liquid content.
Now let's talk paper for a minute. When you're using ink for illustration and painting purposes,
you're going to want to limit your paper choices a little more than if you were using the ink
with a dip or fountain pen for calligraphy or hand lettering. When you're simply writing,
almost any paper is going to stand up to the ink. When you're painting with the ink, you
need a paper that can handle wet media. Lots of people seem to like smooth papers like
Bristol for ink art of all types, but I find Bristol tends to buckle and warp a little
too much for my liking with wet techniques. I like to stick to watercolour paper, or else
the heaviest mix media papers I can find. Most mix media papers are cold press papers,
but watercolour papers can be either cold or hot press, and some mills even produce
other options. Cold press papers have a lot more texture to them. The tooth of the paper
is quite pronounced, as the paper fibres weren't thoroughly flattened during manufacturing.
This is the most common type of watercolour paper you'll find, and the cheapest brands
are pretty much exclusively offered as cold press. That's not a bad thing, just something
to note depending on your personal preferences and what you're trying to achieve.
Hot press paper flattens the paper's fibres a lot more, flattening the tooth into a much
smoother surface. Some mills label papers as "Not" press, and this is generally similar
to the rougher cold press, though purely based on the fact that some companies offer both
cold and not press in the same lines, I have to assume there's something slightly different.
Don't worry about it. Cold and not are rough, hot is smooth. Some companies will also offer
a "rough" option, which has even more tooth than cold press.
Rougher papers like cold press are more absorbent, which means they will dry quicker, but also
means your paint or ink is more likely to feather and not hold a crisp edge. This tends
to be sturdier paper which can handle more corrections, reworks, and lifting, and doesn't
change too much in terms of dimension due to being thoroughly wetted. Colours dry less
vibrant, and the texture of the paper is always apparent. When working overtop of your watercolour
or ink in another medium such as coloured pencil, you're going to see the tooth of the
paper in the pencil pigments unless you work hard at burnishing the tooth flat. I don't
recommend blending pencil with OMS over top of another medium, as you never know what
the OMS will do to the under layers. Hot press paper, being smoother, is less absorbent.
Watercolours and inks take longer to dry, giving you more time to work and allowing
for different wet techniques that are more difficult on coldpress. Colours dry much more
vibrant. Crisp detail is more easily achieve. Too much water can result in warping of the
paper that doesn't dry down to the same dimensions as before, and although straight lifting techniques
are easy, serious re-working can quickly wear the paper down. Hot press is a better choice
if you do a lot of work in pencil and don't want to see the texture of the paper underneath.
Art papers are usually made of wood pulp, linen or cotton, and watercolour paper specifically
is almost always either wood pulp, cotton, or a blend of the two. The best material for
watercolour paper is cotton. Cotton is very strong, naturally bright white, and naturally
acid-free. If you want your art to last, then you need an acid-free paper, as this means
the paper is less likely to break down or to encourage colour shifting over time. Wood
pulp, however, is cheaper, thus cheaper papers will be made primarily or entirely of wood
pulp. For this reason, I recommend picking watercolour papers with the highest percentage
of cotton fibres as you can afford, and look for papers that claim to be acid-free or pH
neutral. My personal favourite paper is Bee Paper Company
watercolour paper, which you can usually buy on Amazon in 50 or 100 sheet packs of pre-cut
6x9 sheets. This is 100% rag cotton, 140lb or 300gsm cold press watercolour paper. If
you're looking for it right now as this video is new, unfortunately that paper is out of
stock in North America, but it should be back again soon. I've ordered multiple packs over
recent years, and they remain my favourite. The paper I'm using for this mixing chart
is Strathmore Vision watercolour paper, which is a student grade paper and probably largely
made of wood pulp. It does claim to be acid-free, though, and it's also 140lbs or 300gsm in
weight. This is a 9x12 inch pad, and it's the 2nd of 3 identical pads I own. I use this
for swatch sheets and practice, not finished pieces. So far I've yet to find a sheet in
any of these pads that's perfectly straight along all four edges, and I find the glue
from the gummed edge doesn't come off the paper well. The first sheet will always have
a good quarter of an inch of rough, damaged paper where excess glue was stuck down, but
the remaining sheets underneath almost always have an uneven distribution of glue that simply
doesn't want to let go. All right, at this point I've finished the
chart and started playing around with some other swatches and some blending practice.
Let's talk about those other swatches I did on the side of the mixing chart. I did a dilution
of all the single colours paired next to that colour mixed with white. As you saw, mixing
with white simply makes a pastel version of the colour. I didn't include white in the
mixing chart, because that's all it would be; a row and column of pastels. The major
difference between adding white to a colour rather than diluting it with water is that
the white mix retains and sometimes even increases in opacity. Sometimes you're going to want
opaque colour, and that's fine. Sometimes you won't, so keep that in mind. As for black,
I didn't add that to the mix chart for two reasons. First, in order to see the colours
and not just a row and column of black, I would have to use so much more of the colour
than the black, and I don't want to waste my inks. Second, it's bad form to darken with
black unless you're trying to get grey or a VERY dark colour. Always try darkening with
another colour first, and remember that a little bit of a complimentary colour can darken
very effectively. That said, I did swatch the black diluted into grey in order to see
what this particular black looks like. It's close to neutral, but there's a bit of a blue
hue to the watered down grey, which means this black will tend to result in cool tones
when mixed, and will mix best with cool colours. I did also mix one specific colour with the
black, and that was Payne's grey, a nice blue dark grey. That's the one convenience colour
I always make sure I figure out how to mix if a set doesn't already have it.
Hopefully my playing around with different wet and dry techniques on the separate sheet
is mostly self explanatory. I wanted to mention that the white ink is fairly opaque when painted
over previously dried colours as long as you apply it thick enough, but if you work it
over dried ink, it does actually start to pick up the colour underneath it. I've also
noticed Winsor & Newton's white ink does this as well, but that's another good thing to
keep in mind. If you want the white to stay white, don't work it over another colour too
much. Thank you so much for watching and for asking
questions. Feel free to ask more questions in the comments down below! If you're looking
for more to watch, I've got some suggestions up on the left side of the screen now. I upload
art content twice a week at minimum, every Tuesday and Thursday, and if you like living
life creatively, whatever that means to you, I'd love to have you along for the ride. Bye
guys!