Ink

Noodler's Ink offers "Eternal" inks that become waterproof once they dry and should outlast the paper, being protected from fading due to UV light. Of course, to minimize fading you can also use UV blocking glass and/or acrylic in the framing.

I started using Noodler's Manjiro Nakahama Whaleman's Sepia ink. I purchased it from The Goulet Pen Company. I'm very pleased with the quality service, speed of delivery and the care with which they packed my shipment. As you can see from the "Ashworth Drugs" painting, it provides a wonderful warm tone.

This ink is an Eternal ink. Interestingly, it is also fluorescent. I'm thinking of using some fluorescent ink on each of my paintings. I can use it for my signature if nothing else. This would be a great way to help authenticate any of my paintings. Not that I expect to become horribly famous. It's just a nice touch to be able to show it to people.

I also purchased Noodler's Blank ink. It is also an Eternal ink. However, it does not fluoresce. In that case using the sepia on the signature would be a way to identify and authenticate a painting.

One other ink that I will be getting in the near future is Noodler's 54th Massachusetts ink. This is a blue grey ink with a lot of character.

Finally, I will also get Noodler's Bad Green Gator ink. This will be a good ink to use with the outdoor landscape scenes that North Carolina provides to us. It's a fairly deep green, but it should hit the spot.

No doubt more colors will come in the future. But this should keep me busy for quite some time.

Edit: Sigh! Sadly I found that some of the Noodler's Inks don't hold up well in the real world. Artist Jamie Williams Grossman in her blog titled the Hudson Valley Sketcher found that some of these inks are not all that light fast. See more in my blog post about that.

By the way, you can use a waterbrush to create a painting effect by washing the lines drawn by either the markers or the ink. The Noodler's Ink tends to work better at this, since the Pigma Micron pens tend to dry so very quickly.

Here's a wonderful example of doing a water wash of the ink lines.

Recently my son added to my ink collection. He presented me with three bottles of Daler-Rowney FW Pearlescent Inks:

The three colors were Galactic Blue, Mazuma Gold and Silver Pearl. I decided that they would make a great drawing / painting of a Golden Koi:

I have some additional ideas for other paintings that will incorporate these colors. Yeah!!