Hello, Flourish Friends -- It's been a moment since I've been able to post something. Work got a little nutty, and I've been trying to scare up funding for my research at the Huntington Library this summer, plus I had several art commissions on top of my day job.
Here's one of my commissioned pieces (shared with permission) - a portrait of one of the state's top hockey recruits, headed to play D1 in the fall. Her proud father commissioned it as a graduation present.
The sketch takes advantage of the beautiful chromatography in Troublemaker's "Polar Lights" (as well as having nice thematic resonance). There's a lot going on in this ostensibly "black" ink - bleeding out mauvy pinks, mushroom taupes, and turquoise blue, with multi-chromatic shimmer that reflects green, blue, and purple depending on the angle of the light, and a bright white reaction to bleach. It's pretty good for both pointed pen and broad edge right out of the bottle*.
* I will add that the bottle is.... suboptimal. It is tall and slender and square/rectangular, and thus very tippy, with a narrow opening that many fountain pens won't fit into. I knocked it over almost immediately and spilled half the bottle. (How come whenever I spill a bottle of ink, it must be a bottle of BLACK ink? At least it didn't get on the rug. much.) Decanting into a smaller, stouter container highly recommended.
Troublemaker inks are made in the Philippines, and you used to have to order them straight from the company and wait for the slow international post, but now they're widely available (Atlas, Vanness, Galen, Cult Pens, etc), and they're very beautiful! Troublemaker were cutting edge formulators of some of haunting duo-tone inks like Petrichor and Abalone (which I've used in Inktober drawings), and now they're giving the Diamine "chameleon" shimmer inks some stiff competition with their multi-chroma shimmer, as in "Polar Lights". Truly, we live in a golden age of ink!
