Tag Archives: Alcohol inks

Trying Ranger’s Alcohol Inks

Posted on by
Reply

If you want to learn how to work with alcohol inks, I can highly recommend watching Tim Holtz’s demos on his blog. After which: start practising!

A great starter kit would be a pack of Yupo papers, at least 2 colors of alcohol ink, and a high percentage alcohol. If your budget allows it: add Ranger’s Blending Solution too, for it will offer you some more options when working with the inks.

I have to say these inks are fun to work with, the colors are vibrant and their fluidity is quite different from dye inks or spray inks; it seems a lot thinner and it ‘flows’ differently. You can use a hairdryer to move them around on your paper, or some kind of hand air pump like Ranger‘s Alcohol Ink Air Blower or JoyCrafts’ Ink Blower.

JoyCrafts Air blower for alcohol inks

Personally, I use Tim Holtz’s Distress Marker Spritzer Tool – remember that one? It was designed for something different but it’s also a great alcohol ink blower!

Lastly, you can even blow through a straw – but be careful, for you’ll get dizzy extra quickly due to the alcohol vapors…

Next to blowing your inks around, you can also use an ink blending tool (with a felt piece instead of a foam piece) and dab-dab-dab – either with inks, or blending solution, or a mixture of both. Add some high percentage alcohol to the mix to get even more effects.

Ink blending tools can be bought from several companies, Ranger among others.

Speaking of substrates: always use a non-porous surface. I used Yupo (a plastic ‘paper’) and also a gessoed craft tag. Ranger‘s Alcohol Ink papers are of course also very suitable. Whatever substrate you use, each will have its own unique properties so it’s useful – and fun – to experiment a lot!

Below you’ll find my first set of such experiments:

Yupo A4 sheet (cut into 7 smaller pieces) – alcohol inks – blending solution – 99% isopropyl alcohol:

Yupo – alcohol inks – copper mixative – blending solution – 99% isopropyl alcohol:

Yupo – alcohol inks – pearl mixative – blending solution – 99% isopropyl alcohol:

Craft tag (cardstock) – gesso – alcohol inks – pearl mixative – blending solution – 99% isopropyl alcohol:

What about you? Have you tried alcohol inks yet? Or perhaps you’re an advanced alcohol ink artist? Let me know and share your story in the comments below!

Dabbling in Backgrounds

Posted on by
2

Sometimes one has to go and broaden one’s horizons. So, I decided to not only watch all of the Tim Holtz demos on his blog, sitting on my couch consuming content (and pork rind chips 🙂 ) but to treat them as an actual course. He has shared many hours of demo videos since the corona lockdown and I treated myself to them all, taking notes in a notebook – I even dug out my fountain pen for that 🙂 . Being locked down at least supplied me with those hours so I decided to take advantage of that…

And so I started to practice and play around with all of the mixed media art supplies I had collected the last couple of years, but simply hadn’t come round to using. And of course I added to said stash with a lot of new stuff too, but hey, we’re not just crafters, we’re also collectors right 😉😎

Anyway, I thought it might be nice to share my first batch of mixed media backgrounds. I mean, I have done some inking & stencilling when creating photo tags for my envelope folios, but not in all of these different ways. This blog post will share the whole batch, and also the card I created from one of those backgrounds. The coming days and weeks I’ll post each individual (set of) background(s) in a separate blog post, with pictures and descriptions on how I created them. And after those, there will be more!

Hope you’ll enjoy this new series of experiments, that will be added to (but not replacing) my other work. Who knows where this will end – there may even be an art journaller hidden somewhere inside me yet…🙃🤨