It’s been a glorious studio day after a week of illness. Endo/adeno misery turned into gastro and UTI horror, along with the rest of my family. Darling Rose was so unwell she wound up in hospital again, which was very helpful and mercifully brief. Poppy was hit the first and lightest with a bad sleepless night of vomiting and then bouncing back. I’m starting to feel better but it’s been a tough month. Vertigo and gout have also stolen a lot of time from me and I’ve found myself falling into deep depression at times and feeling isolated.

Today I was well enough to go into my studio and play. Among other things, I’ve now set up my travel watercolour kit with my favourite colours (mainly Sennelier with a Qor and a couple of Winsor and Newton).

Done a lot of colour mixing. This is completely different for watercolour than with oil paint and I’m having to learn all new combinations and techniques.

I adore my blue black ink, but it’s an unusual ink and one of its qualities is that it doesn’t keep when diluted. So for my ink paintings with gradients I must try to mix small amounts and accept the waste if I don’t use them all. I hate this so I have been practicing a two brush Chinese ink painting technique that blends ink on the brush in one hand with water on the brush in the other directly onto the paper. It works very well for some techniques but I find it difficult for others.

So I have been hoping to blend a similar colour with my watercolor paints, that keep forever between uses. Today I achieved that with a mix of Quinacridone Red and Phthalocyanine Turquoise. I tested it by making two tiny artworks. This one is in inks, with outlines using a dip pen with black ink:

This is in watercolour using only a brush:

They are extremely close in colour! I’m very pleased with this result. There’s a quality to the ink I still prefer, a clarity and depth I don’t find in watercolour but that may well be simply that I’m less experienced with them, and possibly because my current mix has several pigments in it.

Either way, I’m very pleased and the black dog feels eased and soothed. We’ve celebrated everyone starting to recover with a fresh change of bedding and a delicious light meal. I’m going to borrow some new books from the library and take it gently this week while I’m recovering.