Inktense Review and Tutorial

I love these inktense blocks from Derwent.  While they work similar to watercolor, they’re not watercolor.  They’re ink in block form and depending on how much water you use, they can be opaque or more translucent.  However, adding more water will affect the lightfastness of the ink.  That’s pretty much my only issue with these is the lightfastness issue, but this is a new product.  So I’m sure this will improve over time.  I do like that you can buy sets and buy them individually.  That way if you run out of a certain color, you don’t have to buy a whole new set just for that one color.

You can draw with these and then add water, or add water to the block and paint just like you would with watercolor pans.  I love the intensity of these colors, and as far as the lightfast issue, if you use a matte UV spray varnish and then put it behind UV glass, you should be fine.  I use a UV spray by Golden for my watercolor, coffee, and tea paintings.  I’ll probably just use that on these.  I need to get some pencils of these inktense and do a review of how those work, but I’ll have to wait until I can afford that.

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