Painted Gourds - Part 4 Photos

Alcohol ink over varnish.

Center section is lighter where varnish was removed.

Before I get on to blogging about the gourds, I wanted to offer an explanation as to what happened to the photos in the last  blog post, in case readers have not seen the update on that post.  The pictures were there initially.  When I came back to the blog later, the photos were gone, although the captions remained.  I had to post them again.  So, here is what happened from my perspective.  I clicked on the icon to post the photo and a new box came up that said that the photos had to be posted from Google Drive.  It went on to say that the photos would be viewable in more types of devices using this method.  In fact, I had to use that method because it would not let me post them any other way.  So I loaded the photos to Google Drive then added the photos to the blog.  Everything looked fine on the blog at that time.  I checked on the blog the next day and all the photos were gone.  I'm guessing that there was some programming error and they had to reload to an earlier backup.  That is just a guess, but it seems like a likely scenario.  Anyway, the photos have been reloaded to the previous blog post.  Scroll back to that post if you want to see those pictures.

Brown section is duller with no varnish.

Now, on to happier things.  The first set of gourds were painted with acrylic paints.  By then, I was bored with dabbing paint on gourds, so I decided to try something else.  How else do you know what materials will do (or not do) if you don't experiment.  In the tutorials I blogged about earlier, the gourds were painted with ink dyes.  I did not have ink dyes, but I did have a set of alcohol inks.  I figured I would give them a try.  I had some interesting results.

Opaque alcohol inks.

First off, the good news:  these inks dry almost instantaneously, so there was really no waiting period before I can go on to the next section.  The bad news:  these inks dry almost instantaneously, so there was very little working time.  I had to constantly stop painting and add another drop of ink to the pallet.  The further news: the new application of ink could dissolve the ink next to it, leaving a smeary section.  Other than that, I had great time with this product.  However, they do have some limitations on gourds.  Read on.

The first gourd I colored to look like a gourd.  After that I was bored with painting gourds to look like gourds.  For the last two gourds I was just having some fun.  But I am getting ahead of myself here.  These gourds already had several coats of gloss acrylic craft varnish on them.  The alcohol inks went on well over the varnish.  They have such a glossy finish that they almost look metallic.  In fact, they are so shiny that I had a lot of trouble photographing them because I could not get rid of hot spots even when bouncing the light on something reflective rather than shining it on the gourd directly.  The first inks I used were transparent colors that let the gourd's natural finish show through.  I rather liked it.  The ink and varnish reflected light in a way that made it look more like a live gourd.

As I mentioned above, I grew bored with making gourds look like gourds, so I decided that I would add some patterns.  So the last two gourds had grids drawn on them with a extra fine line marker.  On the second gourd, I used a piece of low tack painter's tape as a guide for drawing the center section.  I learned something very useful from that.  When I removed the painter's tape, it pulled off some or all of the varnish across that section of the gourd
.  This seriously affected how the ink reacted with the gourd.  In the sections where all of the varnish was removed, the ink stained the gourd, but it was very dull and much lighter in color in comparison to the rest of the sections.  In areas where only some of the varnish came off, the color appeared much lighter as well.  I have added a close up photo of the section where the varnish came off so you can see how things worked out.  I had read in the forums on gourds that people had a lot of trouble with paints chipping off gourds, but up until this point I did not really understand just how much of a problem it was.

The third gourd used inks from the set that were fairly opaque.  They colored the gourd nicely, and were opaque enough that the natural coloration of the gourds were obscured.  The one thing that surprised me on this, was that they dried much darker than I thought they would.  The blue ink came out of the bottle in a color that I would have to describe as a peacock blue.  It dried to a dark navy.  The red is a really beautiful ruby red.

The inks really set into the brush.  They did not completely come clean when washed with soap and water.  I used 90% isopropyl alcohol to clean the brushes thoroughly.

That is about the end of the gourds commentary.  Check back again on Sunday for a new project.