(If you would like to comment on this submission, you may do so by posting a reply in this thread. Thanks! Kaitlin)
I was going to wait and do this one "after the fact" because I figured there was a pretty good chance this project would go kablooie, but to my delight, so far so good. Therefore I'll take the optimistic route and do this in real-time, once I get you caught up on all I've done so far.
Some history: I hadn't had much luck with color scrim thus far, though the dragon I did about a year ago did turn out really nice, I'll admit it wasn't exactly as I had anticipated. Everyone seems to have a different technique. Some people are sealing ink between layers of wax. Some are just being super careful about inking to avoid colors overlapping and bleeding into each other.
I tried the super-careful route (on the dragon) and though it worked it was a serious pain in the you know what, and I could tell there's no way I could pull it off on a big piece, since I was always having to wipe the ink away from the previously inked areas, and at some point that just becomes impossible.
Someone's probably going to ask so I'll just post this, here's the dragon, my first color scrim, I think I did this last October:
I tried the wax thing and that one (you will never see this piece!) was a disaster. I was using etching ink, and it seemed no matter how long I let it sit and dry I'd lose some of the ink when I applied the wax (Renaissance wax, fyi). And seriously who has time to wait for things to dry out for weeks or months when you have a lot of colors you need to apply.
So I kinda set the the color stuff aside and have focused on black and white work only. And that's fine, because often I think that's makes a stronger statement on such a tiny piece anyway.
But darn it, I really wanted to figure out this color thing. Those in the know all told me I'd have to work dark to light, starting with black and ending up with my lightest colors. Ugh. My brain works light to dark. I've been an artist/illustrator primarily working in colored pencil (though lately I'm more of a graphite girl, I think scrim's b/w influence is rubbing off in other realms) for years, and I work light to dark, and I'd like to be able to do scrim the same way.
And the first thing that was clear to me is I'd have to use a different ink, sadly, as I am rather fond of printmaking ink of all types. But it didn't agree with the Ren Wax, and besides that I ran into a problem where someone wore a pendant *all the time* and the ink started to pull out. Maybe that would happen with any ink, but it makes sense. You can use oil to clean etching ink off of tools, plates, etc. So of course skin oils will over time do the same thing.
*sigh* That means back to using colored India ink, not my favorite, but I'm determined...
Goals for this project: learn to scrim with a different ink, determine if it's possible to work from light to dark, hopefully make a little something pretty.