Fabulous Friday Fun

UPDATE LABELS, LINKS, AND PICS ON 10-1-21

This week I am going to touch on Alcohol Inks by Ranger Industries. It is hard to show the process in still pictures since you have to work kind of quickly. I learned how to use alcohol inks from a scrapbook store owner. It's different from the way Tim Holtz demonstrates them in THIS old YouTube video. It just goes to show there's more than one way to use products. I think everyone likes to learn new ways to use products they may already have or were thinking of trying.

Here's a little bit of information about this card that I'd like to share with you before we start. First, I had this image from Robyn's Fetish  (see below) already colored in and wanted to match the green in the leaves to the paper. I have the alcohol ink color Citrus but the green I was looking for was more of blue-ish green. We were all taught at a young age that yellow and blue make green and so I was willing to mix Sailboat Blue and Sunshine Yellow to find the color that matched my colored image just perfectly.

Second, I didn't buy a blending solution or the tool to apply the alcohol inks. The store owner taught me that regular under your bathroom sink alcohol would work for a blending solution. I had an empty bottle from a dollar store three-pack that I poured the alcohol into and that serves as my blending solution. Then I had my husband cut me a few pieces of wood and put some self-adhesive Velcro on them to act as my tool. I bought some cheap felt from a craft store and cut squares the size of my block. The felt sticks to the Velcro making this a cheap alternative to the Ranger tool. Here's the thing, I've never used the Ranger blending solution or their tool and they may work better than my homemade alternatives. But for cost sake, I would rather be able to buy different colors of alcohol ink with the money I saved rather than the tools.

OK, on with the show!!

Supplies:

1.) I used this image from Robyn's Fetish:

2.) Inkessentials Glossy paper

3.) Alcohol ink pack 

4.) Pearl Mixative

5.) Copic markers G02, G05, G07, R24, R29, R39 and R89

The rest of my supplies came from my stash.

Let's begin. This first picture shows my alcohol inking supplies (minus the "blending solution" AKA rubbing alcohol).

Then I'm going to mix the blue and yellow together on the felt. I started by lightly squeezing the bottle in three different places on my felt like my picture shows.

After the blue, I added the yellow to the felt and then some alcohol to the felt as well. On the paper, I place little drops of Mixative all around. It gives the whole paper a sparkle instead of just a couple areas that you get when you add it to the felt.

From there you just twist the felt block onto the drops to mix them all together. For my first attempt at matching the green I ended up with this:

It was too yellow to match my holly leaves. I cut another piece of paper, added more blue to the felt than yellow, and came up with this:

So you are probably thinking they look pretty similar. Here is a picture of them side by side:

Now you can tell the top paper is bluer than the bottom paper. As you may recall I said you have to move quickly with the way I do it and the pictures prove that. The small circles you see in the papers are the mixative. If I were to blend the colors faster before the mixative absorbs into the paper, I wouldn't have those circles. I would come up with a more even distribution.

Here is a close-up of my card with the alcohol inked paper (the top paper from the last photo). Once it dries and with a little strategic placement of embellishments you can't see the circles of mixative on the paper as much as you do in the pictures above.

Here is my card all done (the sun decided to poke out for the picture):

I think the green in the holly leaves matches the paper well. I hope you enjoyed this brief tutorial on how I used alcohol inks on my card and you will be inspired to pull yours out for your next project.

Remember if you do use alcohol inks on your project and post me a link in the comments field of this post I will send you a prize.