Watercolor VS India Ink ☾ Painting Pros + Cons

[Music] hi guys and welcome to my comparison between using watercolors and painting with India inks I've been thinking a little bit about this about how they actually differ what are the benefits of one over the other because it seems like you can get very similar results but I wanted to have a little bit more of a comparison one versus the other so I'm gonna talk a bit about the things that I found and actually some of those are pretty surprising but really quickly I do have both of these paintings available as the originals at my shop I also have prints of them also at my shelf there's a link down in the description that will take you over there and if you'd like to see the full length video of both of these paintings then there are videos up on my patreon for the $5 tearing up there's a link again down in the description that will take you over there now let's just go ahead and jump into the topic at hand okay so we really need to go over the exact holes and I'm using so you have a frame of reference but on the watercolor side I'm using mainly M gram watercolors I highly recommend them I love them they're mixed with honey so they have this really supple kind of semi moist consistency all the time and they're really saturated and on the other side I am using dr. pH Martin's India inks and I'm excited to really test out how painting with them works it's something that I've only done very a little bit in the past so this is something that I can really experience how they play together and what they do and what their capabilities are and the paper that I'm using is arches Hot Press so that is this very smooth watercolor paper and I'll talk more about that in a bit on how each type of paint actually behaves on this type of paper and I'm going to switch between one painting and the other between basically the same steps so that you can kind of see me working with one medium and then the other and so you know it's the one with the purple hair she is painted entirely with watercolors and then the girl with the green hair she is painted with inks and I'll have a little bubble up in the corner that'll tell you whether I'm using watercolors or ink at that exact moment if you're curious so diving in one of the biggest differences is with India ink once they're dry they are pretty much waterproof and with watercolors some will stick a little bit more certain pigments and then others are really easy to activate again and I find that both of those things really have their pros and their cons but the watercolor is being able to reactivate them is something that you can really utilize to be able to fix mistakes to have certain effects where you can have things fade in and out and you can really manipulate that as you're working with it a little bit more but some of the negative sides of that is that you might really love what you have down do a wash and then the pigment underneath happen to be one that is very easily reactivated and then suddenly it's bleeding out and that crispness that you had is no longer there I find that with Payne's gray one of my favorite paint colors it is very prone to this so I have to be aware that if I'm going to use Payne's gray I have to use it last or else it's gonna just bleed into everything else now with India inks since once they're dry there are pretty much waterproof it means that I can confidently do layers underneath and then glaze on top of it and know that it's not going to get disturbed it's going to stay the way that I want and I can really just brush things on and add lots of water and layers and I actually love that freedom of being certain that it's not going to get disturbin that I'm going to be able to just play with it the way that I want to so that is a huge benefit I actually really love that that's something that as I was working on this painting I didn't realize how how much I had to tiptoe around certain things with with watercolors and this I could just dive right in of course the negatives that go with that is that if you make a mistake even like right off I've noticed as soon as it touches the paper it's much more staining than most watercolors not all but most so once I put it down if it was a little bit too concentrated and I try to water it out like I would with a water color so that it has a little bit more of a gradient and it mixes up that potency a little bit more with these India inks it's kind of a mistake that once it's there it's there unless I go darker around it so I have to be a little bit more careful with the initial application but once it's something that I want it's going to stay it also means that I can't go in and lift up areas that I might think could use a little bit of tweaking like a can with watercolors and it's a bit of a continuation with with the permanency note that I had already talked about but what I'm doing line work I've been leaning a lot more heavily in doing line work during the painting stage with usually the tools that I'm using at that time so using watercolors to do line work and using inks to do line or confirm using the inks and I have definitely found that it is a lot easier to do line work in the middle of a painting with the India ink which I know it's not surprising but it's a lot easier to be able to put it down and then do glazes on top of it and continue developing that area that I'm doing so like with the hair I did a lot of line work in the middle of it and then I painted more and then I did more line work and I really loved that actually I loved that I was able to move around a bit and do different steps in the lip of a different order now for the watercolors I actually did a very similar kind of a process to I really did want to try using them both in very similar situations so I was doing line work while I was painting it but again because it's reactive a table I did have areas that started lifting up a little bit and smudging and it wasn't a huge problem it just meant that I had to be a little bit more careful about where I was painting and also cleaning up after so I spent a little bit more time going back and making areas crisp again which wasn't as much of a problem with the India inks but I did find that may be a benefit for the watercolours as I felt like I could get a little bit more subtle shifts in color than the India inks I think it was mostly because once I put the India ink on the paper it was there and with the watercolours it allowed me to create gradients a lot easier while I was painting on top of the paper and to keep working at it and to re lift up some areas that had settled and then get a little bit more of a blend and then incorporate a little bit more variety into it I think that it also has a little bit to do with the fact that I have a lot more variations of colors in watercolours than I do in my India ink set so that might be affecting it but but I do think that with the tools that I had with the paints I could get a little bit more subtlety to the listen to the colors themselves okay now we can talk a little bit about how they actually behave on this paper now I think I'd have to do a completely different comparison on cold press I kind of wish that I had but this is on hot press hot press is my new favorite go-to paper it allows me to get really crisp details I absolutely love hot press but it can be a little bit more difficult to work with with watercolors on top of hot pressed paper where it's actually surprisingly easy to get more texture in your washes so when you want something to be really smooth it can be a little bit more of a challenge and I was kind of really shocked at how much control I had with it India inks I think it was because it just gripped and it created a very homogenized layer with the inks so I was able to put it down and it looked really consistent with the watercolors to get that same consistency I really had to fight it a little bit more and I had to layer it more so that it ended up with a more cohesive blended look overall rather than one layer one pass that had that same quality to it so I was just yeah I was really surprised I was so surprised at how much more control and crispness I could get with the India inks and that was something that I really loved actually I I don't know I think that's something that I'm going to want to pull from a little bit more and use a little bit more of India inks in this kind of style and this kind of painting and this is kind of a continuation of talking about the subtlety of the colors with the watercolors but I found that with watercolors I could get much richer darker colors and with the India inks it was a lot harder to get them to be deeper and value and I think that I mean and part of it I think is just the inks that I do have but I found that when I did my research most of the translucent India inks which is what you want for doing this kind of painting you want them to be translucent so you can create these glazing effects and make them look like watercolors but they tend to be on the medium to light range of values which means it's really hard to get them really dark but with watercolours the level of pigment that you have is just based on how much pigment how much paint you're mixing with your water so you can make it really concentrated and rich and with India ink so you're kind of limited with that level that it's out of the jar at since it's already it's pre-mixed it's already wet and lighter and that's it so I do really like the range of values I can get with water colors a little bit better it's a lot easier to maintain really rich saturated colors on the darker scale and then on the side with the India ink I really had to incorporate colors that desaturate it a little bit more to get darker tones and even then they weren't quite as dark as I wanted I think in the end I really genuinely love both of them for their different benefits I think going forward I'd really like to try a painting where I utilize both of them together maybe doing an under painting in the India ink and then painting with the shadows and the subtlety that I can get with watercolours and then do the line work with the India ink so that it's permanent and it doesn't blend in with the watercolors that I do afterwards so I really like to try both of them and infusing a little bit of the the benefits of both into one painting I'd love to hear from you guys if you've used both of these which one's your favorite what kind of benefits or problems you brought in to I don't know I'm really interested in this because it is something that seems like it can really just be a very personal taste on which one you prefer and which benefits who would rather use and that is it for today I absolutely loved working on these two projects and comparing them and seeing which ones I liked best it was a lot of fun just to get to know my own tools a little bit better but like I mentioned at the beginning these are available as originals and prints at my shop there's link in the description and the full video of both of these pieces are also up on my patreon right now so if you want to go see a little bit more of these that link is also in the description I also post here every Wednesdays at Saturday so I'll be back next Wednesday with another video and you go son [Music]

Channel: Danica Sills

Views: 51,637

Rating: 4.9762611 out of 5

Keywords: watercolors, watercolor, watercolor tutorial, how to watercolor, india inks, inks, painting with inks, how to paint with inks, painting tutorial, watercolor vs ink, watercolors vs inks, watercolors vs india inks, art supplies, compairing art supplies, painting with india inks, how to paint with india ink, watercolor effects

Id: MMfelVj1Moc

Length: 11min 15sec (675 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 09 2019