Great, now my tablecloth is ruined (Salad Magazine #3)
This is a reprint of my submission to Salad Magazine issue 3. Check out what everyone else submitted too!
An ink painting of a spilled ink bottle. (The bottle in the painting holds the ink that was used to paint it.) The spilled ink transitions into a painting of a starry night sky looming over a forest of deciduous trees. The trees and stars are reflected in a lake. The sky was created by dropping ink in water, resulting in abstract blooms that resemble clouds. Glitter varnish was brushed over the sky to create the stars.
Most fountain pen ink is completely water-soluble, which usually spells doom if you spill your drink on a paper you've been writing. But it also makes for some pretty cool effects because you can treat it like watercolor. Unlike watercolor, some inks will separate into their consistuent pigments in water; it adds a neat effect to washes without you having to do anything. I will freely admit that I stole Nick Stewart's style in doing this because his art was the first time I'd seen ink used in such an interesting way!
The ink I used was Sailor's Shirakashi, which is an olive color that usually looks pretty brown but can turn into a silvery blueish green on certain types of paper. It separates into blue, green, and orange with water. It's one of my favorite inks so I really wanted to do something with it.
The fun and infuriating part of working with ink is its unpredictability and permanence. If you get a glob in your nib or regret putting a line down, you have to work around it. I didn't map out the blob at all and just threw some ink into a puddle of water. I really hated the result at first and thought it was beyond the point of no return until I noticed the blooms formed tree shapes in some spots, so I decided to run with that. (Either way, I wasn't about to do the bottle over, so I had to think of something...)