Tutorial of the Week: More Techniques Using Alcohol Ink

Good morning, everyone!  …time for another tutorial 🙂  Last week, I showed you how to use alcohol inks to color your metal filigrees and other non-porous embellishments.  Well…guess what?  I have more techniques to share with you this week…I had so many ideas last week that I couldn’t fit them all into one blog post…not a post that you’d want to read to the end anyway.

If you missed last week’s post, you will definitely want to give it a read.  I talked about some important stuff that you don’t want to miss…like protecting your work surface, skin, etc. not to mention the task of cleaning up. You can find that post right HERE.

So…here we go!  Let’s have some more fun with alcohol ink!  Continuing on from last week…

Method #6 – Removing Ink Using a Rag

Last week we discussed how dripping alcohol ink onto resin flowers can achieve a super vibrant color.  BUT…sometimes I like to add a bit more dimension.  How do I do that?  Well, I just add a bit of blending solution onto a clean rag that is wrapped tightly around one finger, and rub some of the ink off of the tips of the petals 🙂

I mean really…how cool do these flowers look?  You will definitely see more variation when you use this method with darker colors, like the purple flower below:

Method #7 – Adding Ink Using a Rag

So…if we can remove ink with a rag, why not add color, too?  Am I right?  I really like using this method on the black and white cameos in the ButterBeeScraps shop to give them more of a vintage look.  All you do is squeeze a bit of alcohol ink onto your rag and wipe the ink onto your piece:

I mean, really…how perfectly vintage does this cameo look?  You can also use this technique to add a bit of color to the tips of the petals on some of your resin flowers.  Here, I just used the metallic mixatives on a rag to add color onto some black flowers.  Remember…the mixatives are opaque, so this totally works 🙂

Method #8 – Framing the Perfect Vintage Photo

I have to give credit to Tim Holtz for this technique, but it is just so cool that I HAD to show it to you…just in case you’ve never seen it.

Step 1

Add a mixture of alcohol inks onto a piece of felt attached to your ink blending tool, and (using Method #1 from last week) “pounce” the ink onto the back of a clear glass cabochon.  I used a mixture of Espresso, Ginger and Caramel with a touch of gold mixative.  Do NOT add any blending solution to the felt yet.

Step 2

Drop a TINY bit of blending solution onto the center of your inked area (You can always add more if needed, but if you add too much to start, you may just have to start over :/ )  Using a clean piece of felt, lightly “pounce” and move the blending solution around the center of the cabochon, being careful to stay away from the edges.  The alcohol ink should spread toward to edges of your cabochon, and you’ll end up with the center being clear…well, almost anyway.

Step 3

Once the ink has dried (which really doesn’t take that long), add glossy accents onto the back of the cabochon and glue it to your picture.  Make sure to slide the cabochon around in a circular motion to get all of the air bubbles out of the glue.

Step 5

Cut around the edges of the cabochon after the Glossy Accents is dry…now your vintage photo cabochon is ready to be added to a frame 🙂

Quest for the Perfect Bronze

If you remember back…oh…3 weeks ago now (yup, I had to check…lol), I had talked about how Julie (thepaperbaglay1 on YouTube) is on a quest to discover the perfect method for adding a bronze finish to silver metal.  Well, I attempted to create a bronze using alcohol inks, and I would rate it as an almost epic fail 😛  I like the final color, but it doesn’t look much like bronze…big sigh.

I used the same combination of alcohol inks as with the vintage photo above – Espresso, Ginger and Caramel – but also added a generous amount of gold mixative.  Here are the results:

I know…it totally looks like more of a chocolate brown.  The picture on the left is a bronze filigree from the shop compared to my inked filigree.  On the right, I sneaked in the filigree I altered using acrylic paints on the bottom.  It’s pretty clear from that photo that I did a better job with the paints than with the alcohol inks.  Oh well…I guess the quest continues 😉

So…that’s it for this week.  Thank you so much for popping by!  …and I’ve been really enjoying the comments, too!  It’s nice to know that there are peeps out there “listening” 🙂  Cheers and have a great weekend!