Last week I stopped at Castle in the Air in Berkeley and came home with four beautiful new inks and a couple of eyedroppers.
L to R: new eyedropper, metallic blue-silver ink, yellow ink, burgundy ink, deep violet ink, playtime with colors, water jar. The water jar used to hold honey and walnuts (a delightful combination!).
One of the droppers was cheap plastic — I remember using the same kind in high school bio — but the other is a beautiful, fragile-looking wand of clear glass. Using it on the inks, watching the rich pigment suck into the delicate receptacle, squeezing colors out into pools of water, made me feel like some kind of lab scientist. Before I knew what I was doing, I had drawn up a grid and was writing in the left column and top row labels with a calligraphy pen.
Upper right of my finished grid.
It’s a natural, more methodical extension of all the experimentation I’ve been doing with wet-on-wet techniques and color mixing. I had so much fun with this — and the finished grid is so cool-looking — I’m considering a series like this for the December Etsy collection.
Finished chart
satsumabug.com | Lisa Hsia 
gorgeous!
Thanks, Tamara! 😀 I think so too — I get happy every time I look at the framed piece sitting on my desk. 😉