Just before Christmas, there was a discussion about all sorts of ways to modify colour on felted pieces.  The topic of Inktense pencils and paint blocks came up and they fascinated me. So I decided to give myself a gift of experimentation for Christmas.

The basic box has twelve colours.  I didn’t get the box with white.  This might have been a mistake, but the block is available as a single unit so if the need is evident I’ll see about ordering one.

The blocks are water soluble and can be used the same as any watercolour.  They do not re-wet once dry do can be painted over after set.  This is the intriguing bit for me.  I cracked out all the old equipment and some new to test the flexibility of these blocks.

Watercolour mixing bowl, watercolour brushes,

And some fabric that I knew would come in handy for something someday.  This was unbleached cotton, a very fine weave and perfect for experimenting.  I have no idea what its original purpose might have been, but I have loads of the stuff.

The first experiments were just smearing water onto the bars, and then painting the wash onto the fabric.  The wash was thicker and thicker with each brush stroke.  Then I tried stamping with some tiny stamps, to see if thick paint worked better than thin.

I had hoped to use the stamping method to mimic the aurora borealis to use on my 75th Anniversary bag as background for the moose, but getting the aurora right is very, very tricky.  This is the best I could do on the first try.

 

It needs much more work before I could ever be satisfied with this.  So the next few experiments involved painting on wet fabric, painting with a dry brush, etc, etc. and waiting for the material to dry.  Then washing the goods in scalding hot water to see if everything was colour fast.

 

If you look very, very carefully, you might see a tiny little bit of blue in the middle. That’s how much the tiny blue stamp transferred to the paper towel I used to blot the test fabric when drying.

The uses for these paints/inks still have me curious.  I want to do a warp with multiple layers of colours.  I just need to work out the logistics of the method.  I can see using them in combination with stitchery and felting to really embellish fine art.  On a practical side, they can repair dye loss in all areas of fiber design from the finest to the most prosaic.  I will be using the hot pink to repair a dye loss on one of my favourite sweaters.  The match isn’t perfect, but close enough