Slide into Creative Saturday

Some imaginative sites to give you some ideas for a beautiful Saturday (here).

Casey Cripe does careful, layered, intricate art that looks like many illustrations layered into one. Thanks to frequent commentor Pete for this one. Your eyes drop deep into the work, then come back up to understand the concept, then dive down again.

Richard Sweeney’s intricate paper sculpture.

Richard Sweeney works in paper forms. He does three-dimensional work in paper, and the intricacy is amazing.

The lighting of some of the sculptures make them feel otherworldly.

The link above takes you to Sweeney’s Flickr site, with a big selection of the projects that fill his mind–and, I’m assuming, a lot of his time.

If you need a place to store all those books you are going to turn into art, visit You May Say I’m a Dreamer.com  You’ll find wonderful bookcases as chairs, as window seats (didn’t you always want a window seat?). Personally, I’d love the book-treadmill, which seems to combine both reading and exercise. Sounds good to me.

If you want to play with paper this weekend, but just have the machine-cut paper, here’s a link to one of my blog posts on creating your own deckle-edges on paper that doesn’t come with them.

Derwent’s Inketense inks are suddenly finding a new flush of popularity. I’ve loved them for a long while for their transparency and their ability to blend well. Here’s a review I did on Derwent Inktense watercolor pencils. In that article, you’ll find a link to Derwent’s Graphitints, too.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Quinn McDonald is making the samples for next week’s class, Art Journaling for Perfectionists. (March 9 at Paradise Valley Community College) The link takes you to the basic information, including the registration link.

 

 

Product Review: Derwent Inktense Pencils

After reviewing the Derwent Graphitint Pencils, I had to review Derwent’s Inktense pencils. OK, I didn’t have to, but it gave me a great excuse to buy and try a new set of pencils.

The two sets are both watercolor pencils, but very different. Inktense colors are a lot brighter, which is to be expected. Graphitint’s (graphite pencils) description is that they have a “hint of color,” which they do, when put on dry. They develop considerably more when you wet them. But Graphitint are all muted graphite tones—wines, rather than reds. Barks, rather than earth browns.

Derwent Inktense color swatch

Inktense is a different story. The pencils are a bit harder, but not scratchy. These are bright colors, but very transparent. When washed over with a wet brush, they look exactly as if they had been made with an ink wash. The transparency really surprised me. Ink washes have always been a bit tricky, they required putting ink into cups, adding water, then trying them out first. Here, they don’t. I apply the dry pencil to paper, then add the amount of water that makes the right tone for the wash.

Best of all, they can be used by brushing a wet brush directly against the pencil, then applying the brush to paper. That makes ink washes portable.

The combination of Graphitint and Inktense makes a wonderful combination set to travel with. I’ll probably add a few colors to the Inktense to give it the wider range I need for the desert, but the blending ability–and yes, they blend with each other, gives a wide range.

Note: if you blend the Graphitint with Inktense, you won’t get the beautiful transparency of Inktense alone.

—Quinn McDonald is a life- and creativity coach and a writer who teaches art journaling for people who can’t draw.