Cafe Venezia (lineart)

© Chromeheart Illustration

Cafe Venezia, on San Marco.  I start all of these with a light pencil drawing, and erase the lines after the ink is dry.  I'm debating what color ink to paint it in with.  I usually do my ink drawings in monochrome, but the coloring of my original photo (below) is really quite striking.

FW acrylic ink -- Antelope Brown; Biro Leonardt #30 nib on Portofino watercolor paper, made in Italy.

© Chromeheart

If you're wondering how I took a photo without oodles of poorly dressed tourists on San Marco in July, well, I didn't.  I took three photos standing in the same spot, and composited them together to get rid of the people.

Venice - Watercolor Experiment

© Chromeheart

Although I normally do work like this in some kind of ink, this time around, I decided to give Dr PH Martin's concentrated liquid watercolors a whirl.  They come packaged like inks, in small glass bottles with an eyedropper in the lid.  No weird chalky paint cakes here.

I have to say, they behaved better than I expected.  The aqua color I blended interacted with the water and my special Italian paper similarly to a fountain pen ink, and dried almost as transparently as an ink.  Liquid watercolor proved to be a very flexible medium on and off the page.  While it's no substitute for ink, it's definitely improved my overall opinion of watercolor paints.

Red Doily

I learned to crochet a few months ago, and after making countless cup coasters, Christmas ornaments, a few "softies," and most of a granny square afghan, I decided it was time to try something different.  Something... dare I say... fancy.  This is a few hours' work on what is going to be a 17" diameter doily.