door by Heather Thompson

There's a freedom and looseness in this that I find really appealing, Heather, and I like the wall colours very much - lots of variety, no boring areas, yet subtly done so it looks 'real' yet impressionistic at the same time. Can I ask you about the Quink - my daughter's doing art foundation and wondered if it's used by artists for its quality of separating out into its component colours?

Thanks Caroline, I really appreciate your comments. Your question about Quink is interesting. I love Quink. It is useful because it comes in a bottle so can be used in a pen or on a brush. It is water soluble, so will run if you paint over it, unlike Indian ink. You can dilute it with water. One of the most exciting things about Quink as far as I am concerned is that it reacts with household bleach to produce some really interesting effects. I have done quite few paintings where I have painted over dry quink with bleach to get a white on black effect. I might post some of these paintings at some point, once I have some I am happy with, I'm still experimenting. As for your question, yes, you do quite often get a separation of colours when you use it which can have some nice effects, but not really seen in my painting above. Quink comes in black and blue but I've only ever used the black so I don't know what the blue is like to paint with.

Very interested in the 'Bleach and Quink'. I love your paintings. Your use of tone is good, and I think we should all do a lot more tonal exercises...particularly me, as I often get bogged down in colour and then the tonal scale is wrong when I step back and squint. Well done.

Thanks Lynne, I've had to work on tone to be honest, it can be so difficult in watercolour. The quink and bleach is a bit hit and miss at the moment, but I'll aim to post some soon as they are great fun to do.