Fun chemistry activity for spy and detective enthusiasts that uses an acid/base indicator to reveal a secret message using a special color-changing invisible ink. Only common household ingredients required. Unlike the traditional activity using lemon juice, this one does not require heat.

So you want to know how to ink watercolor? It’s actually a very simple three step process. First you draw it in pencil. Then you ink it. Then you erase the pencil after the ink dries. That…

Alcohol inks are brightly colored dye-based paints that are most often used in creating free flowing textures. They can be used alone in mixed media projects such as printing and stamping, jewelry making, fabric dying, and brightening up household objects. Many markers contain dye-based alcohol inks, so the tones and c

Find some tips for eye-catching custom t-shirt designs with perfect color combos for ink matching. Elevate your creations today!

What do you see?

Jason Logan's new book is a how-to guide on natural ink making

Alcohol inks are best used on non-porous surfaces like glass, plastics, metals, and varnished wood. Porous materials like paper, untreated wood, cardboard, sponges and fabric, should be avoided. So then how, you may ask, can artists paint with alcohol inks on cotton canvas? Priming a Canvas with KILZ 2® LATEX KILZ 2® LATEX is a fast drying, ​water-based, multi-purpose primer, sealer, and stain-blocker. Because it seals porous surfaces, it's a great way to transform a porous canvas into a non-porous one. To avoid noticeable brush strokes, I prefer to use a foam brush, which you can find in all different sizes at Blick or craft store of your choice. I prefer to use the widest brush I can find, and after applying the first coat, I like to run over it with a clean and dry foam brush to make sure the surface is 100% smooth and that minimal brush marks peak through. As long as the surface of the canvas is no longer visible (I like to coat the sides, too!), a second coat of primer should not be necessary; I do encourage you to use your judgment though. You can also prime wooden panels with KILZ, but in this case, you will likely want to apply several coats to make the surface more opaque. Looking to prime a black canvas? You’ll need KILZ Klear. Once you've finished coating your surface, I recommend letting it sit for about 30 to 45 minutes before you begin painting with your inks. Do not start painting if the canvas is not completely dry. Click here to purchase foam brushes. Need canvases? I recommend shopping for them here. Want to know which alcohol ink products I use? Where Can I Buy KILZ 2® LATEX? You can find KILZ 2® LATEX at any hardware store, but it's also available in-store and online at Home Depot or Lowes. How Do I Clean Up and Dispose of KILZ 2® LATEX? KILZ recommends cleaning up equipment and paint splatters with warm, soapy water, but it's important that you properly dispose of the container in accordance with federal, state and local regulations. They recommend calling 1-800-CLEANUP to learn how to recycle or properly dispose of your primer. Want to Learn More About Alcohol Inks? Share this blog post with your friends on Pinterest! Disclosure: Links to Blick Art Materials and Amazon are affiliate links, which means that at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Please note, I only promote products that I personally use and love!

Ever since I first heard about watercolour sprays, I’ve been wanting to try them out. The ones you can buy ready-made are I discovered quite expensive, so I decided to create my own using the new powdered water-colour inks I’ve recently treated myself to. That way I can control the dilution I want, mix the colours, and be much more extravagant with them as they are so economical to use. So, I mixed up my inks, and bought some travel sized spray bottles to put them in. There are quite a lot of posts around the internet at the moment for using spray paints with kids, more particularly using trigger sprays outdoors. This looks like great fun, but with the small sprays we were using you can use them with kids quite safely indoors, as long as you take reasonable precautions! This activity was quite a hit with my boys – they couldn’t wait to get stuck in, and even now, every time my 4 year old sees me using them, he wants to join in too. He sometimes struggled with the sprays since they’re not the trigger kind, but he managed most of the time, and I was able to give him help when needed. Again, we used heavy watercolour paper for this, which absorbs the ink so much better, and had lots of paper towels and newspaper to hand, because we were often swimming with pools of ink. As the pools developed, we tipped the paper so that the colour ran, creating new effects. We also used a spray of plain water, just to encourage the ink to run or bleed into the next colour, or even just to make a lovely speckled pattern (wait for the paper to dry a little so that it is no longer shiny, but still damp if you want to retain this ‘rainfall’ effect). If you have the patience for it, you can get beautiful subtle layered effects by letting one colour of spray dry before adding the next. A more mottled effect is created if you continue spraying so that some of the tiny droplets merge to create bigger droplets. We also experimented with masks, stencils and resists to create patterns. Drawing with a wax candle (or wax crayon if you want colour) was effective, as was spraying through paper doilies and lace. We also went outside to fetch leaves from the garden to mask the paper. The ghostly effect achieved is rather like that you find with sunprints, only you don’t have to wait for the sun (which has been in rather short supply here this summer). Alternatively you can create your own stencils and masks from household objects, or paper cut outs. By the time we’d finished we had a whole stack of beautifully decorated fragments of paper. So, what to do with it all? I discovered that by tearing the thick paper, you could get a lovely decorative white edge (remember you have to tear the strip you are removing towards you, if you want to retain a white edge). Punching a hole at one end, and threading a ribbon through it, created beautiful gift tags with a real luxury feel. You could also use strips to create book marks in the same way, mount them onto plain card to create a greetings card, or even as use fragments as a background for beautiful unique, one-of-a-kind business cards. The surface is ideal for writing on, and if I was able to do calligraphy or had beautiful handwriting I would personally like to use them that way. But I don’t, so maybe I’ll experiment with stamping them instead! Whatever you use them for, the results are much too beautiful to throw away!

Invisible Ink Using Turmeric: Hey guys! In this Instructable, we're making art that magically transforms! You may already have all the materials you need at home.

So you want to know how to ink watercolor? It’s actually a very simple three step process. First you draw it in pencil. Then you ink it. Then you erase the pencil after the ink dries. That…

Here are Augusts selection. Another fine mix of everything that is good about watercolour. Gerard Hendriks Arti Chanhan Another from Gerard ...

I made this one specifically for my junior students, grades 1-3. Sourced from all over and including some made up be me and my students.

This is a very spontaneous form of printmaking! Students used black ink and/or watercolor paint to dye a long piece of cotton twine. Laying the colored string in a looped pattern between two pieces…

crystal layout wooden pattern layers tiles together

Racoon Drawing is fun ! Here's how I penciled, inked and painted 73 raccoons. Read until the end for a little surprise !

You can absolutely make your own HOMEMADE ALCOHOL INK to SAVE MONEY and to make your own CUSTOM COLORS. These markers are dye-based which will give you high pigment loads in your homemade alcohol inks, and are the BEST. You can also use ethically-sourced micas or acrylic paint, as long as you make sure to ONLY PU...

Luli Sánchez

First of all, I want to congratulate all of you who thought about my challenge and are going to step up this year to making your own doodles. Doodling is a very key ingredient to even the largest, most complex works of art. Before I get into cross hatching some more I have a little business to cover. Copic Certification, Anaheim I am opening my class on Friday, Jan 23 up to the general public. Anyone who can come is welcome for the 23 only. Cost is $120 but you get about $80 worth of product to keep, so it ends up being a really great deal for an all-day class. Send an e-mail to Kris at [email protected] or call her at 866-662-6742 to register. There are only a few spaces, so call right away. Applications for Spring East Coast Venues will be going out next week, so get on our mailing list today! This includes Florida, New Orleans, and any confirmed locations that SallyLynn will be teaching on the East Coast thru March. Tonite I will be giving a free lecture at 6:30 at the Eugene Public Library on the History of Manga and Manga trends in America. This is appropriate for teens or adults. I want to thank all the people who attended my teen workshop on drawing Manga earlier this week. The class was very full and very fun! I'll probably be teaching some more local classes this term, so look for Fine Art/Architecture workshops through DIVA and maybe another teen Manga class during school vacations at the Library. Now, let's start the New Year by stepping out of your comfort zone and drawing something yourself- simple cross hatching. Cross Hatching Basics In my post a few days ago I talked about what cross hatching is and what it is trying to accomplish, today I'd like to get into technique. Cross hatching is both very simple and very tricky at the same time. The idea is easy, you draw lines and they make something look shadowed. The tricky part is practicing to keep a steady hand. Drawing short lines will be easiest at first. Don't worry about making all the lines perfect, that will come with practice. Practice by doodling on anything handy. This is an exercize, not life or death, so relax and know that it's OK to make mistakes as you learn. First, find an angle for your artwork that feels natural. For me, I am right handed and feel most comfortable making strokes that are straight out from mu chest, but with a slight right slant (1). To get another angle to my hatching I need to turn my paper so the lines I draw will be facing that same comfortable direction (2). Then, you need to practice, practice, practice. Try drawing lots of little areas that are cross hatched. You can do this with a mechanical pencil, you can do it with a cheap ballpoint pen, whatever you have handy, just try drawing hatching marks. 2 Layer Cross Hatching Technique You need to practice putting marks that line up. It is easier to make the edge that you start from even, and let your pen gradually lift up at the end of the stroke. Turn your paper so that when you are adding the marks, the crisp edge feels natural to your hand and you work from the edge, out. When you come back in to add the second layer of hatching, also work from the starting edge out, or it looks a little strange. Notice my example. The trailing edges meet up nicely and look smooth. The second example looks strange because one trailing edge fades, but the other is crisp. If I were filling in an area between two outside lines this wouldn't matter as much, but on an open area it doesn't work. Practice until you can confidently add hatching that meets up with a line. Soon you'll be adding hatch marks to all sorts of things (squares on reports, lines on your notepad). This sort of doodle practice is very important to build relaxed, natural hand-eye coordination. NO STRESS! Why should you draw and doodle if it's going to be stressful? relax. Inking Pen Hatch Marks I'm usually making cross hatching on artwork that needs to be scanned in, so I tend to work with 0.1 or 0.05 mm multiliners. I made the mistake once of doing a large, beautiful, very detailed illustration with cross hatching in a 0.03 mm pen. When I scanned it in, the hatching was too fine for my scanner to pick up, particularly since I had to shrink the final artwork. All my hard work cross hatching was wasted! Now I draw slightly thicker and not quite so detailed. As you can see from these examples, there are lots of looks you can get from each pen size. When I draw, I work with a couple sheets of paper under my work at any time. This gives me a slight cushion so that I can push harder to get thicker or thinner lines from the same pen. On fine sizes like the 0.03 or 0.05mm pen, I would NOT push hard however. Those tips are sturdy for what they are, but they require a very light hand. Most people can get fine enough lines with a 0.1 or 0.2 mm inking pen. Look at how much thicker the 0.35 looks when compared to the 0.03 pen. The 1.0 pen looks really clunky and thick next to the finer sizes. I would probably not use the 1.0 by itself for hatching unless I were working on something very large and not too detailed. If you look back at the examples of the different pen sizes you'll see how layering once, twice, and a third time gives you progressively darker tones. You can always layer different pen sizes to get even darker tones. Here is an example of regular cross-hatching, with a 1.0 pen thrown in to really darken up the final edge area. It doesn't look so clunky when layered like this, unlike when it is used by itself. The circle really looks dimensional and shadowed now. For my final example today I've taken a simple chair from Lockhart Stamp Company and I want it to look like it came straight out of my old Alice in Wonderland book. It's so easy to make this chair look more detailed than it really is. I know that if I make a mistake I can always stamp it again. I'm using a really fine 0.05 mm pen because the picture is so small, but you could probably use a 0.1 or 0.2 mm pen and it would still look OK. I start with the first level of shadow in the areas I know will be darkest, then I come back with a second level. Now my chair looks like an antique illustration from around 1900, not just a nice garden chair. I know Karen won't mind if Alice comes and sits in this beautiful vinatge chair. Look at your own image collection and see which ones would look cool turned into vintage drawings simply by adding a few lines.

by Cory Godbey "Children's literature is the first literature and the first art that children are exposed to. It should be good. And when it is, it should be given respect." - William Joyce. William Joyce: Guardian of Childhood is one of the current exhibitions at the Upcountry History Muse

A watercolour by internationally renowned artist, botanical illustrator and author, Philippa Nikulinsky AM is one of the many delights of the WA Museum Boola Bardip. This work is the result of an approach by the WA Museum in 2019 to see if Philippa was interested in creating a painting of WA wildflowers, particularly from Kwongan […]

Explore mirror-image printmaking with liquid watercolor and droppers.

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Here is a list of free high-quality silhouette sets of a wide range of subjects including animal and human figures.

When we were in Cape Cod last week, I did a quick vignette sketch of the Highland Light near Truro, and I thought you might enjoy seeing a step-by-step of how I added the watercolor back at home. Here’s the completed sketch… “Highland Light”, 5-1/2″ x 8-1/2″ ink & watercolor in Stillman & Birn Beta […]

Discover how to create the illusion of depth when drawing or painting. Practical methods to draw and paint with a sense of depth and space.

This is a very spontaneous form of printmaking! Students used black ink and/or watercolor paint to dye a long piece of cotton twine. Laying the colored string in a looped pattern between two pieces…

Download this Free Vector about Watercolor ink splash element, and discover more than 15 Million Professional Graphic Resources on Freepik

Let's explore colors that fairies would love! From moonbeams to mushrooms, here are 9 Fairycore color palette combinations.

This is a very spontaneous form of printmaking! Students used black ink and/or watercolor paint to dye a long piece of cotton twine. Laying the colored string in a looped pattern between two pieces…