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Showerthought: A friend told me my ink mixes were 'muddy' and it changed my whole process
I mean, I used to just grab a couple of bottles that looked nice and mix them in a sample vial, maybe a 50/50 split. I thought I was making cool new colors, but a friend in the hobby looked at my swatch cards last year and said, 'Honestly, these all look kinda muddy.' She pointed out that I was mixing inks with totally different properties, like a super wet Pilot ink with a dry, dusty Noodler's one. The pigments or dyes were just fighting each other. So I started keeping a notebook, writing down not just the color names but the flow and dry time of each ink before I even think about mixing. Now I test tiny drops, like 90/10 ratios, and wait a full day to see if anything weird happens. It's slower, but my blues actually look blue now, not gray. Has anyone else had a simple piece of advice that made you stop and rebuild your method from the ground up?
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gibson.sean1mo ago
Yeah, mixing without checking the base properties first is a sure way to get mud. I learned that the hard way too. You gotta treat it like a chemistry experiment, not just a color guess. Like what Julia_fisher28 said, it really does hit different once you slow down and test those tiny batches. I keep a cheap notebook just for ink notes, flow on one side, dry time on the other, before they ever touch. Saves so much wasted ink and paper.
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