I’m really happy with the results so far. Some colours are clearly standing out as superior in tonal quality and degree of waterproofness etc. which are important qualities when ink painting.

Eventually I would like to own at least the primary and secondary colours for ink paintings. I attended the grant information workshop on this week that I’d had up on my What’s On page, it was a bit discouraging as apparently they do not provide any funding for people to self publish. Apparently their thinking is that if the work was of publishable quality, someone in the publishing industry would do it. This doesn’t really apply to niche markets such as poetry – even very well known and respected poets often self publish their work as most publishing companies are not interested in small print runs. In my situation, retaining the copyright over my artwork images and also being able to control editions and small prints runs is really important to me. Once locked in with a publisher you sometimes have trouble where the work has all sold and you have requests for more, but the publisher won’t do another print run or allow you the copyright back to print the book elsewhere.

So, I may have to look elsewhere in that area, but another possibility is seeking some support for more traditional and well understood resources, such as funding to buy more inks and papers, or mentoring by a more experienced artist or writer. One way or another the various projects I’m nursing along will have their day!