I’m an artist who loves the versatility of a medium. Working on hills, in studios or just in my front room, I need something that is both compact but still contains the quality that every artist requires.
Imagine my face when I found out that Derwent were releasing the Inktense Paint Pan Set, combining the best of Inktense – ultimately my favourite medium – with a pan set for mixing, blending and adding to my on-the-move materials.
With 12 colours presented in the Derwent Inktense Paint Pan Travel Set, each colour has been carefully selected to give a popular and varied selection, making them perfect for either landscapes (my speciality), abstracts or portraits.
The magic of Derwent Inktense does mean that you can dilute the pigments with various amounts of water, creating a really wide range of different and colourful tones depending on the combinations you use.
Like all Inktense, the colours are vibrant and the different blocks can be blended to create more colours, meaning you don’t have to use much pigment at all as they lay down so well. The added advantage of Intense is that once dried, you can add layers on top without affecting the layer beneath (as opposed to watercolour).
Also, by pre-mixing paints in the palette wells, new colours are ready to go, meaning you can add finer details on a big board or broadly wash a smaller piece paper with a colour of your choosing – be it lavender purple, moss green or a shepherd-red-sky.
Inktense, amongst many others, has one big bonus for me: unlike soft pastels, you can quickly switch to painting with Inktense blocks to achieve a more fluid look, creating drama and movement with your brush strokes.
This can’t be achieved with a wet soft pastel in the same way, as you lose the ‘sparkle’ and clarity with the colours. Pastel blocks quickly go dull when watercolour is applied to them – not with Inktense!
The ingenious compact Inktense Paint Pan Travel Set is ideal for outdoor and small studio work – It’ll definitely be joining me on my next holiday.
Rob Dutton is an experienced artist and art tutor from Leeds, UK
See his work: www.rdcreative.co.uk
Can you tell me when this paint box will be available in the USA? I checked my fav store, Dick Blick, and they aren’t there yet.