I don’t have the exact materials suggested for this project, and where I live on the Sunshine Coast of Australia, it can be impractical and/or very expensive to purchase them. Therefore I used mostly products I already had, but purchased one bottle of Global High Flow Acrylic (like ink) which was fun to experiment with.

Line Variations

I drew shapes with light lines, heavy lines, and varied lines using a separate piece of very inexpensive A3 paper for each medium: compressed charcoal, soft pastel, wax crayon (not water soluble), acrylic, and high flow acrylic. It was good to use large sheets of paper to move freely and feel the differences. The paper looks gray in the photographs, but is actually white.

Acrylic and Other Mediums

On A4 watercolour paper I first applied compressed charcoal, soft pastel, wax crayon, and high flow acrylic over dry acrylic, then over wet acrylic. The examples on dry acrylic are fine. The charcoal on wet acrylic is like scratching with a stick except that it leaves dirty bits behind; the pastel and crayon lines on wet acrylic also look scratchy close up. The wet acrylic stuck to the charcoal, pastel, and crayon and had to be wiped off.

Ink (High Flow Acrylic) and Other Mediums

On dry A4 watercolour paper I scribbled with compressed charcoal, soft pastel, and watercolour pencil, then painted with high flow acrylic. In each case the ink dissolved some colour with attractive results. Yes, I remembered to rinse the brush out carefully when painting over charcoal!

On the lower half of the page I wet the paper first. The compressed charcoal, soft pastel, and watercolour pencil seemed to be set by the water on the paper and did not blur into the ink.

Thank you, Robert! This class has encouraged me to try new combinations.