Molotow One 4 All Paint Markers

I had a pleasant surprise yesterday when my order of Molotow “One 4 All” Paint Markers arrived in the mail. I should add “finally,” since I ordered them online from a store in London, Jackson’s, taking 3 weeks to get here, but they had the best prices.

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The pens come in several colors, different tip widths, and refillable bottles. I got a white and black 1mm size, and a large black refill bottle for $25. The tips are hard, but you can get some line variation by pressing down, which increases the flow of paint. With a light touch the lines are fairly thin. Their black paint is quite dark, but the white is slightly transparent, as you can see in the image above with the white drawn on a scrap piece of printed paper. I drew the white over the black marks after it had dried for a whole day, and pressure caused the marks to smear a little. When I scribbled over an area of black the paint turned grey. Although the paint dries to touch very fast, the binder is not strong, causing the blending.

They sell empty pens that you can load with paint or inks. The paint needs to be rather thin to flow out the tip properly, such as in their refills. I’d like to try different brands of similar paint, like Golden’s High Flow. You can thin the acrylic paints with water if you like to add more transparency, and mix you own colors.

New Painting: Carlos Plans a Garden

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Starting a new painting, finally. This should help pass the time as I “shelter-in-place” from that global pathogen that has us all hibernating, not that it’s changing my routine very much. This will be an oil painting based on a photo I took of my neighbor, Carlos. He had been outside building a new garden, and was taking a break as he figured out the design.

I had made a rough sketch on newsprint paper to the size I wanted. That size was just determined by a pre-cut mounting board I had, 15×20. I loosely glue-tacked a sheet of Tyvek paper to it to paint on to give the surface something sturdy to handle. I transferred the sketch to the Tyvek with a brown color pastel as an outline (pictured left,) and then toned the whole thing with a thinned wash of burnt sienna paint. The next stage will be to start laying down the darkest tones.

Silicone Vapor Shield Paper for Art Use

I recently picked up a roll of paper that I wanted to test for artwork. The product is called “silicone vapor shield,” which is a silicone coated paper sold as a moisture barrier underlayment for wood floors.

What attracted me to this was the size, price, and availability. The roll is @3ft x 72ft. I bought it at a local Home Depot for $16. The silicone is coated on one side, the other side is regular raw paper. I should mention that I have no idea what kind of paper is used, or how the coating might affect the paper long term, so it should be treated as non-archival.

The above image shows drawing media applied to the raw, uncoated side. It behaves just like regular paper stock, and takes all the different mediums very well. The paper is 6 mil, which is fairly thin, like a printed poster, but the silicone makes it relatively stiff.

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Above I painted on the raw side with watercolor. In the first image I just taped it down, and the thin paper buckled a bit. Later I stretched to to one of my home-made stretcher bars, and it shrank tight as a drum. This will work well with watercolor or gouache.

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Here I tested mediums on the back side of the watercolor test I had made. Some mediums worked well on this silicone coating, some didn’t work well at all. The worst were mediums that were very wet, like the gouache or wet inks. Many pencils worked fine, but didn’t get very dark, and the powdery types like pastels or charcoal won’t work at all. Acrylic and oil paint went down okay, but there’s not much adhesion to this surface. The coating also makes wet mediums dry much more slowly.

In the image on the right you can see how easy it was to scratch through the acrylic and Pitt marker. The acrylic resisted scratching better when I added a medium. The oils beaded up slightly when diluted with oil medium or thinned with solvent, but still coated rather well. I think this would work okay as an undertone layer. I didn’t see any oil or solvent penetrate through to the other side. The initial layer of either acrylic or oil is thin and streaky, less so with more opaque pigments, and subsequent layers on top of that would look normal. Even this beading up still makes an interesting texture that could be useful. Painting over a beaded acrylic layer with oils, or drawing over it with the layout marker could make an nice effect.

In summary, keeping in mind the caution on treating this as not acid free, I see this as a useful, economical surface for drawing or painting at a fairly large size for paper stock, especially for sketching purposes.