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Old 10-14-2008, 05:41 PM
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KatherinePlumer KatherinePlumer is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: Oak Run, California
Posts: 233
Default Re: Katherine's Tutorial #3: color scrimshaw peacock pendant

Hot diggity! Pardon me while I do a happy dance!

(I'm much better than that, but this was the only smilie..) ----> :dancing: LOL

Finished!:



Mounted in sterling silver:



A closeup, this is scanned at something like 500%. It kinda shows the gradations and overlapping of colors:



It worked! Glee! As predicted, the black ink IS the difficult one to work with, it's just so opaque, if it gets into the wrong places it's pretty hard to get it out of there. There is where a "three hair" paintbrush comes in, you really have to be careful inking, and removing excess ink.

One thing I would like to work on is getting the color more saturated. Rod C was right when he called my scrim "subtly colored." It is! But you know, I'm pretty amazed how similar it actually is to my drawing... Mixing a brighter blue would have helped a lot with the saturation. Using dark blue instead of black for the shadowing would have helped, and of course the real solution is I just need to make MORE DOTS. I REALLY simplified the color scheme on this piece. Knowing now that it works and feeling more confident I can work with a broader range of color, more like my colored pencil work. It's definitely hard getting "solid" colors. I have seen some scrims that leave ink on the surface rather than fully buffing it down. Oh sure, that looks pretty, you get nice bright colors like that, but in my extremely opinionated opinion, that's not scrimshaw, that's just painting on ivory.

Did I meet my goals?

1) learn to work with different ink: yes! It's a whole different thing than using etching ink, but it works and I think it's going to have much better staying power on a piece that's likely to be handled a lot (jewelry). Of course clients will still need to be careful and use common sense with this stuff, but for useable pieces (versus framed art scrim) I am now going to be using India and colored inks.

2) can I scrim from light to dark?: Yes!!!!!!!!!! :whoo: :whoo: :whoo: That's so exciting. Don't get me wrong, it's hard, it can be frustrating, it's not for the feint of heart, but it can be done. I wonder how it would work to do the shadows first, like a grisaille painting. I never paint like that anyway so personally I think it would be hard for me, but it may be a very valid method of scrim, I wouldn't rule it out. Might even have to try it some day.

3) did I make something pretty?: Well I think so.

I have ideas for bigger and grander color scrim, so keep an eye for those too! So many ideas, where do I start...

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions please feel free to ask. If there's anything you want to see me try in a tutorial let me know!

-Katherine