Day 4 – Painting with Alcohol Inks

I followed the instructions in this tutorial and absolutely loved the results.

I was amazed how quickly the inks dried in the wells.  I filled one of my blender pens with blending solution and labeled it because now that pen can only use that solution.  Something in the solution makes it impossible to put any other solution in the barrel even water.

I used a piece of clear acetate to stamp some images using Stazon black ink.  Stazon is an ink that’s designed to be used on materials like acetate, metal, any hard non-porous surface.

I turned the acetate over so I was basically filling in the lines of each image.  I love the look that comes with using alcohol inks, but it took a bit of time to learn how to control the strength of the color with the blending pen.  On some images, the ink combined with the blending solution created a halo effect.  Not at all what I was going for.  The alcohol ink dries very quickly and the cool part about the blending solution is that is a sort of eraser.  To tidy up an area all you have to do is clean the blending brush then run it over the area you want to clean and the ink comes straight up.  Almost like an eraser.

I’m not an artist and struggle with shading and highlights so my attempt at this technique fell a bit short.  After all the ink dried, I flipped over the acetate to access my work.  I was moderately pleased.  I’ll definitely keep working with the paints and stamped images.

Because alcohol inks are good for many surfaces, I grabbed some glittered foam letters and colored a few.  The result was stunning and the letters still glimmered with glitter after the ink dried.  In the future, instead of searching out ‘the perfect color’ of alphas, I’ll just find white and color them myself.

I know I’ve only scratched the surface of alcohol inks.  In the past I’ve used them to make backgrounds for cards by inking up photo paper.  The chemicals in photo paper react with the inks and the blending solution and create beautiful stained glass effects.  I should give that a try again now that I have the inks out.

Until tomorrow,

I was just kidding about the ‘chew toy’ remark.  I wouldn’t do that now, I’ve matured.