Saturday, May 09, 2015

2LO Texture-making Class : Alcohol Inks

 

I am enjoying this lesson from Denise Love's 2 Lil Owls Texture-making Class, playing with the alcohol inks.  I'd tried this a few months ago and was not impressed -- turns out the secret is in the Yupo paper.  I was using some photo paper that seemed shiny enough, but it gave disappointing results --exactly like Denise showed in the video when she said not to bother purchasing the regular photo paper.  Yupo makes the difference!

For the most part, these are straight from the scanner.  I haven't done any post-production tinkering with these.   No need!

You could call these Living Inks as they move and develop and become something else in the course of the making.  You just keep playing until you have something you like ...   It reminds me a lot of Citrasolving a National Geographic magazine.  Makes me wonder if alcohol spilled on those pages would also melt the NG ink?  Anyone tried it?

It also makes me wonder if the Hubble Telescope really did send back all those pictures from Space, or if it was just someone at NASA playing with alcohol inks? [Wink!]

Fair warning : This is a very long post heavy with texture images.  If that's not your thing, bale out now!  For the Texture Lovers out there, enjoy the feast for the eyes! :

























 This is actually the first one I did with some homemade alcohol + Rit Dye.  Not as brilliant as the Ranger Adirondack Inks, but still kind of cool in an old world map kind-of-way.













 Wonderful results almost every time.  If you don't like what you see, you just play a little longer until you do!  There were a few that wound up in the re-do pile to be revisited another day.







2 comments:

The Idaho Beauty said...

Your theory about Hubble may be right...although I often suspected it was those early quilting batiks they were messing with. ;-)

I've always been in the dark about alcohol inks - people not really explaining what makes them different from other inks. But recently the light dawned as I read down a list of inks with descriptions for their use. Ahhh - alcohol inks were made for non-porous surfaces (and all those people I'd seen using them were NOT using them on non-porous). That explains why they work so well on Yupo. Just last week or so, the gal over on Joggles was demonstrating on Yupo and I must say I'm a little intrigued.

Anyway, I'm sure this was one of those things that was hard to stop playing with - I'm in love with your results!

Eija said...

Oh I just love these! Can't stop gaping. And they look like you had fun playing with them, too. Beautiful work!