Transcripts
1. Introduction : Knees are such a important part of nature, earth and our survival. And they are in the cutest little thing. So today I'd like to show you how I created a couple of different alcohol bumblebee projects. Hi there I am Kelly chassis. I live in a beautiful state of Maine and I've been teaching online courses for over four years now. I live the lake and I'm debt free and I'm also a featured artists at the Portland International jet port or a loved to sell my work, prints, cards and originals that go all over the world. So I am excited to share with you all my little steps that I use to create some really lovely looking wispy backgrounds. Also, some really fun bees. So we'll be diving into some more abstract b's, maybe a little bit more realistic if you are someone that likes that more realistic look. And we have a few projects in this one, including on how to mount your alcohol ink painting to a wooden cradle board, which is very contemporary look and it's very in right now. Who will be working with some different techniques with the alcohol inks, such as stippling and lifting. And then we have a really in-depth project at the end, using alcohol things for this lovely cone flower. And the projects in this course will take you really from that beginner status all the way through to a more intermediate final project. So grab your favorite drink, a cup of tea, cup of coffee, and maybe even a cookie at little. Let's get painting. I hope to see you in the course.
2. Sealing and Safety: So if you're a new alcohol inks, you may not know that there are a lot of different brands of alcohol inks. And with each one of these brands, you're going to have different chemical reactions with either resin or your sealers or your spray. So it's really important for you, especially if you're just starting out and you have not tried alcohol ink with some of these other types of chemicals to find out what your alcohol brands are going to do. So we have like T-Rex, we have the Jaccard, Kenyatta inks, we have Ranger inks. There's berries, there are a lot of brand new ones coming out because it's getting very popular right now. The first thing I would recommend that you do before you do anything and this is with any of the alcohol in classes before you seal them, is to test out your your inks and your sealers together to see what they're gonna do. So what I like to do is just take a sheet of paper or mineral paper, ceramic, tile, whatever substrate you want to work on and do a test run. Because you will find that within brands, certain colors have a tendency to bleed more than other brands. But in a lot of places outside the US, they may not have some of these brands. So you're, you're dealing with different chemicals and you've got to find out what's going to work for you. Texture came are your UV sprays. And there's different types of sprays that you can get. Winsor Newton has a brand rest, solium has a brand. Again, I have not tried everything out. And because you're dealing with chemicals, they are always changing things up and they're always different. So test what you have before you do your creations. So I will tell you the number one. A way that I like to seal my angle is actually behind you the glass, the way you don't have to spray. But if you're not going to do that, you wanna make sure that you spray it with some Kmart varnish or a different brand of your choice that you've tried out and tested to make sure that it's not going to reactivate your inks when you spray it. So the camera will seal it for you and then you can add some UV spray on top of that. And I usually do a couple of codes of each very lightly. And then I direct people to keep keeping their work outside of direct sunlight. That's what's going to save your inks from fading because alcohol is our die. They are not light fast and they will fade over time. And I also wanna mention not to scare you, but because a lot of people have reaction or having breathing issues because of using a lot of alcohol and breathing that in. I do not use alcohol inks in a very wet state. Usually, if I do, I'm usually using a VOC or a volatile organic compound mask. It's going to filter out all of those fumes. Make sure that you have a well ventilated area. You can do this outside. You just don't want to be breathing that in. So especially when you're spraying all of these other, other things on top of it. So the Kimara varnish again, you want to make sure you're outside or if you're using a VOC mask with the cartridges are the filters. And another thing is keep those filters in a separate baggy closed up because they're usually a carbon type filter and they'll go bad a lot faster that way. So you can see I displayed as really quickly with a light spirit came our varnish. I'll do that again. And then I'll add the UV protected on top of that. Once this is dry.
3. Practice - Alcohol Ink Wispy Background: So welcome to the course. Let's start out with just practicing some backgrounds. I've taped down some UPA paper and I'm using some extra heavy gel, semi gloss, medium by Golden and I'm just using my fingers, scooping out a little bit and just creating a little texture on here. And I just want to show you some of your options that you have or your background. We're gonna be doing some wet and wet techniques and a little bit. But just to start, this is a nice, easy way to warm up, so we're going to let that dry. Meanwhile, let's practice some wispy looks really easy to do and you may see a lot of this now out. But a lot of alcohol ink artists, it's just so pretty, pretty way to mix and match colors and Beginners and definitely do this. So I need to do is put a drop of alcohol. And I'm going to start off with some of the greens because I want the greens and yellows for the backgrounds for the bees that you can use this with any, any alcohol inks that you have, and any colors that you want to try. So I have a little tool here that I'm using and it is basically just to blow air for cleaning your camera. So this is a really fun little tool, very inexpensive way to move the inks around. And it doesn't have a whole lot of air. When I when I when I blow or squeeze it, they do have some larger ones. Ranger just came up with a new one that supposedly pushes a little bit more air than some of the smaller ones will do. So you can check those out or you use what you have if you already have a camera and trial which you've got, you can also use canned air for this crispiness. You can use a small air compressor, which I've used in many of my other courses. But this one is just a really nice light and blow of air, touch of air, so it doesn't go all over the place. And you can see as I squeeze it here, a little bit of, a little bit of control with that. So I'm just dropping the inks and then adding that alcohol, 91% alcohol just to blend those out are very smooth blend and I'm just touching the edge here. You can see when you squeeze it and just bloomed out, the more alcohol you have, the thinner or the lighter that shades going to be. And you can see I'm moving it in all different directions here. And you'll notice some of the green hues or really you can see some of that blue that comes out of the die when you're using the alcohol. And you can see some of these colors will change. And now all brands will do that. Been yada alcohol inks are very heavy, very thick. So they have a tendency not to change color quite as much as some of the other shades. But I always recommend if you're new to alcohol inks, go ahead and make yourself a little color charts and see what your inks are going to do. One stayed dry and try a little alcohol and try it with a little bit of blending solution. So if you want to lighten it just a little bit or softened has edges a little bit more and just continue to add the alcohol around the outer side of it. And then you can then that up. Now you'll notice I have more of that spray or that those little spindles that come out and adding that isopropyl alcohol to the edge of that just really gives it that soft wispy luck. Now you'll notice that I can continue to move this around as long as the alcohol is wax up here, I've got that little bit of orange so you can take a move at. And again, if I want to thin that out a little bit more, add a little bit of alcohol to the edge and you can continue to blend that a little bit more. You know, a lot of artists when they're doing this wispy look like to go from corner to corner or from top to bottom, left to right. But you can maneuver these in different ways. I like to do the alternating where I do the yellow and the green. And then if you wanted to throw a third color in here, obviously you can do that as well. You can see that beautiful, lovely little light blue that green is creating anyway. Because Mia, color and wear your green and a yellow mix, you'll get another little neither. She'd just softening now a little bit more. You can see again that the blue shade comes out. So pretty. And you could use this as like a little hairdryer. I'm going to take off some of these ridges here and soften those a little bit more. And you can see how that's a reactivating those inks and just spreading it out in a very wispy, soft look. Let me just show you if I add a drop of alcohol to the center of this and you say I got that big circle, that big bloom, not quite as soft of a look as you get when you do that towards the edge. So I always recommend coming around the edges of that if you need to maneuver that out a little bit more. And you can see how it just creates a little bit more texture in your alcohol ink, less of that. Soft whisper Venus. Again, if I hit the edge length at reactivate some of those hard lines. Stephen, pick it up and move it around. You see how it picks up some of those other colors and just moves everything a little bit more. And then again, taking your tool is blowing that air a little bit. So you can play in practice with that and see if you can soften some of those areas where you get too much texture. As a whole idea of that wispy look as not to get those hard edges on here. Let's do one last little bit of green down here. We can soften that a little bit more. Again, I don't like those little spindles, so adding a little bit of alcohol right there. And then we'll soften those so they blend a little bit more. So that's what it looks like with alcohol. Let's go ahead and try this now using some blending solution. Now blending solution, again, there's a lot of different brands and most alcohol inks have some type of blending solution. So for T-Rex and they call it clear blending. And for Kenyatta they have an extender is what they call it. So they're all basically very similar in the respect that they let the banks take a little bit longer to dry and a little bit different than using isopropyl alcohol was they don't tend to fade your colors quite as much. But the big difference is you'll have a really pretty sheen on your alcohol inks rather than alcohol, which will make it appear more flat when you're finished. So again, just a preference based and the alcohol blending solution has like a little bit of resonance, and so it does seal it. So it's really good to use with the pearls or any kind of mixing and things like that. Again, you have a little bit longer work time, but with the blending solution than you do with the alcohol, alcohol dry lot quicker on 2M. So if I pick this up and turn it to the side except beautiful gloss that, that has. And then if we look here at just the isopropyl alcohol, it's more flat than more flat finish. So now that we've done this, so let's go ahead and check out that texture and that should be dry now.
4. Creating a Textured background : So this is actually a really fun and a pretty way to create a lot of texture with your alcohol links. So the extra-heavy gel semi gloss by Golden is dry now and it's dry to the touch. And it's created just a little pretty clear texture on here. So when you apply the alcohol inks over the top of it, and you still get that translucent effect. But you got a little bit of the texture underneath of it. So let's do the same thing we'll use, will use isopropyl alcohol for this. And I do want to say that isopropyl alcohol obviously is a lot less expensive than the blending solution. And there are many artists prefer having the alcohol. Now with COVID going on right now, that it is a little bit more difficult sometimes to find the 99 percent alcohol. Some folks have used ever clear alcohol, grain alcohol, you could try that. Some folks have used hand sanitizer. So there's other options for you to use and test out and see what you think about it. Again, it depends on what's available in your area and what the cost is. So you can see again, I have that wispy appearance, but when I come in close, you'll be able to see that beautiful texture that's in here. Now I'm thinking this would be really pretty here and there. And if I were to create some flowers, more abstract type of flowers on my background, and this would be really pretty so the textured almost be where the flower was. Or he just want to create a little patches of it here and there. Or even if he did like the whole background with this as a very textured piece. And then left your area that you are doing your painting on in the center, maybe mask that in or leave that area blank so that the rest of it, the rest of the texture will pop out. It may be a little bit more difficult if you're trying to paint something more precise on the texture. But again, as with everything, give it a go, try it out. And just because someone doesn't like it, doesn't mean that you, you, you won't, or vice versa. Some folks really like that texture, especially in some mixed media pieces. So I've decided to add a little blue in this one. Again, just moving that around. You can see that a blues almost that the color by spread that out. It's a similar color to the green when it lightened. Some of those secondary colors that come out from the die. So I blended all of these are A1 together and it creates a beautiful background. And if I flip this upside, upside down a little bit, I could actually do some really pretty drips with the alcohol to, which would be really a neat effect. So there's so many options, but look at that gorgeous texture and there's my beautiful, so many options. Just another little piece that you could add to make yours will look a little bit more unique and fun.
5. Painting bees : All right, so we've practiced a couple different backgrounds and now I thought we'd practice some really fun little abstract type Bs. Now the fun thing about alcohol inks is that they have a little bit of a mind of their own. So we're going to grab a practice piece of UPA paper. I just have a strip here that I've cut off the side of one of my larger pieces. But feel free to use any size paper you want. I just like using the scrubs because it's a really fun way to practice and you never know what you'll end up doing with these if you cut them out and stick them somewhere. So I have my T-Rex yellow, sunshine yellow and I'm dropping it in there and you can see it says Drop and that's really just spreading out. And you can see it almost creates its own little shape, which is really fun to create more of an abstract looking a little b on here. So let's go ahead and give it a try. So I have my messy palette here. I'm gonna find a little spot ahead, just some yellows if we can utilize this without getting too much other colors in here. Yeah. So that's definitely has some black still in there from the last time I used it. So I'm going to wipe that off. Let's try it again. I still have a little bit of a Tintin. They're still a little bit of black. Not happy with that. And let's just go with another drop here. That first one is drying up there and you can see how much it's moved since we first started. So I'm using a little bit less this time and I can actually manage that a little bit better and get a little fun shape in there, you know, is give it some little hairs. Those little fuzziness of a bumblebee. This one, it's not a honeybee, insulins a bumblebee. There are so many different types of bees. I was looking that up and it's amazing how many types of bees there are. So I have shape that out just a little bit. Let's go ahead and grab the black. And let's see if we can create a little bit of little stripes as we all know, bumble bees for the, the little black and the hair where the eyes are and inhibit a little bit of black on the backside of them and then on the bottom and look depending on what kind of be it is. Again, I looked him up and there's a lot of different types, but some have a little bit of a reddish brown on the backside of them to then get a little bit more of that fuzziness and then get my little penny wing here. Not a lot of details. You can just kind of shape it in here. These are so much fun. So here he is in this direction. Now you could always use the black sharpie to create like little legs if you want to go on here or even a black sharpie for the wings, the wings do get a little bit thick even though this is a very small brush. It's a, I think it's a size 0 that I'm using a very fine detail brush. But still sometimes it's a little bit more difficult when it's when the ink is wet, so we'll let it dry a little bit longer. It's easier to manage, but it likes that blended a little bit so that yellow wasn't completely wet and it wasn't completely dry. Very fun challenge for you, especially if you're new to inks, to learn about your dry time in different times of the year. It'll actually be a little different if it's really humid where you're at. This can take a little bit longer to dry. If you are in a very dry environment or have a wood stove or fan or D Hume's things like that. You'll have all different reactions to when your ink dries and at different times of year. So keep that in mind when you're working with it. Let's say I have another drop. Let's see what this one wants to do. So I'm a little bit of that black on there, so I'm just maneuvering it, adding that to the backside because I know it's going to be black anyway and up here. So that can kind of see this, sort of sketch it in with your brush this way. And we'll go into a little bit darker now I know where I want it and see how that it just kind of blend in naturally. I think these make the cutest babies honestly. Get a little bit of head here. The eyes is used in flight. These are all in flight. Him a little bit of an antenna and some little legs on this one. And hit the back of the leg is kinda scoop outward when they're in flight. So he's cute. It's still maneuverings, so it gives you that blurred look. Let's keep going and try a few more of them here. And each one of them. And there's going to be look like they're flying a little bit different. Some are larger than others. Now I want it didn't even put a wing on them, is willing to be backwards. Let's go with another smaller one here again, I've got a little bit of that black on my brush so I can maneuver that around to where I want to get a little bit of a shape in there and think about it. And then go in with a little bit darker color and a little bit of black on the back, wall, the bottom, and then on the head where you can make little eyes. And they each have their own little personality. They're just so much fun to make. And you can see how fast it just kind of creates itself. That's the great thing about alcohol inks. Now that one kind of pinned down a little bit further with the yellow, but that's all right. We'll still stick a little leg in there. He's good to go. Just looks like a little pollen on there. So now you might find if you have a background color, it doesn't work quite the same as what it does on just plain new Bo paper without any color. Because remember, it's going to push those colors underneath away. So if you want to background and you're adding your b onto a background and it's a dark background. You want to try this with maybe a blue shade underneath your knees and then try it on top just so you can see the difference because you are going to have, is going to be a little bit of a change on there for you. This one listening is coming this way to me. He didn't spread out quite as much, so we'll make the head going down and then we'll again, we'll get that little bit of black on the back and on the backside of them. It's kind of curled in underneath there. So easy. Yeah. You can just make this up as you go along. You kind of look at them and see what shape that God is creating and work with what you have on that. A little bit bigger. You remember this too. I always say this in my classes. You can always make them bigger, but you can't make them smaller, usually. So always keep that in mind when you're creating these things tend to grow on you a little bit. So for project, what I want you to do is grab that strip of paper and he's eyes and just start practicing creating some bumblebees. Just putting a drop or a blob down there and see what little shapes it can make. Some are going to be bigger, so we're going to be smaller. So we're going to look more like a honey bee. So we're going to be like a big old bumblebee like this one is. And if you feel more comfortable, go ahead with just a very little bit of that black first, just more of a gray color. And then you can shape things out the way you want it. And they can go back in with the really dark black and shape that in a little bit more. And it will give you that really pretty like a two tone shade in here. So have fun with it. That's, that's all. Don't worry about it too much. Just create a bunch of these little b's and get comfortable with how the ink smooth and how the shape is kind of grows on its own. And then once you've completed about five to ten of these little bees, go ahead and just share that project with us and our Facebook group. Or here in class, I can't wait to see what your bees look like.
6. Bee Sketching More Realistic: So now let's take a look at more realistic looking B. This is one that I did on Procreate on my iPad. Just quickly sketched it out and I wanted to take a look at the actual shape of the beam. So we have the head, then we have the thorax, and then we have the abdomen. There's three little pieces there. They have a forwarding and the hind wing. And this one is going to be more of a honeybee shape. You can see it's a little bit center, it's not quite as fuzzy and that's almost the shape of a and little a. And so we have that head shape of the eye. Again. We have the thorax and then we have the abdomen down below. And I actually did this a little bit too close to the kink at the wing, quite large enough. We have a couple little wings there. I have two on each side, but when they fall back in on one another, they look very flat on most of the b's. And we have a little course, a little antenna. And then I'm going to add just a little bit of darkness in here just so you can get an idea of where those little stripes would be. And again, there are a lot of different types of bees, so they all look a little different, a little bit different coloring. And sometimes it can be very difficult to determine which one is which. But they also have the worker bees, they have the drone bees and then they usually have the queen bee, which is usually a little bit larger. So let's take a look at it above. So if we were to create that three little circles almost like building a little snowman and then filling and again that little black and the yellow, which would be yellow. And I think we'll take the alcohol inks and just do a really quick fill in of these. Now the legs will get a little bit larger and when they are out there foraging, pollinating, you can see, usually see those little chunks of pole on the back legs a lot of times or all over the b. So this will throw a couple little rings in here. Again, they're not kinda wonky here, but the top wings usually a little bit larger than four wings, a little bit larger than the second set of wings. So let's do that. Again. This is a smaller shape that you see not quite as much of a bumblebee. That one's a cute little on one of the above. It was more of a little, little bit large, kind of a funky little b. You can see how just drawing using a couple of times. Every time I do want these, they look a little bit different. I always have their own little character. Let's do one more down the bottom again from the side. And we have the head, we have the thorax and then we have the abdomen. Couple little wings in here. And I like a little head shape is more elongated there. We've got a more rounded on this one. Just a couple of little stripes in here. So you can see how simple it is to make a little bumblebee. And we can add a little bit of fuzz. Let's go ahead and add a little bit alcohol ink on the sketch. This is a more controlled way of doing it, rather than dropping it in as little blobs. We'll just fill this one in with a little paint brush here. And I don't know, I'm on the bottom. Let's just add a little dollop of pollen in there. He's been busy is EB. And then I'm just going to fill in loans, adding just a little bit of the alcohol ink and it's basically like coloring. It changes color in those areas. All of the yellow. And we fill all of these in and you can see how fast this is. So if you're really nervous about doing the abstract ones, you can always do it this way where you have a little bit more control or you can fill it in or draw in the B on your paintings where you decide to put them. You can also take this one once it's finished. How cute would this be? Just to be a little bookmark. So you could spray it with some Kim or varnish and maybe protection sealant. And this would be an adorable little bookmark for someone, especially someone that maybe collect species or likes bees or flowers, things like that. So once you have the yellow completed, make sure that that's dry. You can always go back and again with a sharpie if it's easier or chameleon pen. So I have a chameleon pens when you use that. And it's got to end on this one. And again, it just basically filling in the area that's black. You can very easily just darken some of those areas that you have your pencil. So remember with UCO paper, your pencil actually show up underneath where you have the lighter colors like the yellows. So you can see your pencil marks and then once you put the alcohol ink over it, it seals a pencil so you can't erase that pencil mark. So if pencil marks bother you, this is another great way just to fill those into. Don't see them quite as much. Okay.
7. Adding Alcohol Inks over Textured background: All right, we've practiced the bees that you might be a little bit nervous on adding the B to your paintings later on down the road. So let's go ahead and practice this on our little demo that we did. We can actually create a cute little painting just from the demos, which is a really fun thing to do with alcohol inks never throw them away if you have backgrounds and things like that because you can repurpose them many times. So I have my little I sketched in just with a watercolor pencil really quick in yellow, those two little round circles. So I could kind of test it. I didn't want to use the pen because or the pencil because I didn't want to have those pencil lines showing up underneath this very light and airy type of painting. So sketching it in and then I added the yellow on top for the couple of circles. I did this a little bit more controlled, kind of an in-between the abstract and the illustration that we had done earlier in practice. So we've got the face and they're having a little bit of that black on the backside. And then let's give him his little stripes. And I'm using a, I think it's this, I thought it was a 0, but it's actually a 0.001. It's even smaller than a 0. And I still have a hard time getting those really fine line even with this. So I would recommend if you, if you have a hard time with that, definitely use the Sharpie or the chameleon pen. You can use a micron pen, whatever you have that is going to work out test your pens first. I always say that because if you spray it with the sealer and UV protection, some pens will have a reaction to the sealer. So always test your products. Always hard to say, depending on the interior using the chemical reactions that you'll have with different products. So I always say tests before you ruin something. Always best. So my my one wing on the right, it was a little bit thicker than I wanted. So I'm going to go back in and thicken this one up a little bit more. But I have a little trick. I'll show you in that way. If you create something on your paper and you don't like it, there are some little fixes as long as you haven't made it too big. Now what's happening here? My wings that keep getting them a little bit larger, a little bit larger because I wasn't happy with the shape of it. And it's always funny because when you're doing this on your painting, you're always a little bit more nervous or other. Whereas when you're doing all those practices, you don't care. You know, it's just on a practice piece of paper. So it's almost like you have to think of it as being a practice when you go ahead and do it. Because if you get too, too tight with your painting, you can end up having more difficulties than you are if you're loose. So I know that I can fix this with using a gel pen afterwards. So it will give it a little bit different look into another option for you. So we have the wings in there. They're looking pretty dark. So let's go ahead and grab a white gel penance. What we can do. Now, this is your first class. With me, you aren't familiar or you may not be familiar with the white gel pens. They are made by signal and they work wonderfully to add a little bit of highlights In your alcohol inks. Now I will say that these pens and we'll pick up the underlying color. So if they're not sprayed with Kmart registry for you add this to it. You may have a little bit of the colors seeping through, which is fine with something like this. It takes away that real bright white look and it softens it a little bit more. But because he adding just a little bit of those highlights in here, I'll take the edge of the black off just a little bit. You could go back in and adding a little bit of yellow underneath, making his body just a little bit bigger, a little bit fuzzy are looking. You can expand on him a little bit. Let me Q. So again, another character. It looks different than all the other ones that we've, that we've dried out. So one of them again, it's going to have their own little personality. So I want to shape that up a little bit more. So I'm going to grab a set of the brush and when I use the black sharpie this time. So you could do that if between the black sharpie and a chameleon pen, the black pen, and they're very similar. So just touched it up a little bit more and maybe help with the legs to get them a little bit center, a little bit wider in that center area. Now he's got some little legs, maybe get some little antennas. Shape up that little mouth a little bit more. There we go. I think he's good now. And then I thought let's see if we can make it look like he's in motion a little bit. So I have a Q-tip and I've put a little bit of alcohol on there. This is again, the ICU tips that are very pointed, very sharp at the end. And I'm almost using it like I would a brush. And I can clean up some of that area just by air scrubbing that back and forth and see how I pick up a little bit of that black. And I can just make a circular motions and soften it a little bit. And then create almost like he's moving a little bit, just giving them a little bit of softness on the edges here. So you pick a pick up a little bit, you'll be careful, but it will pick up the black sharpie, pick up some of the colors and just move it a little bit so I can get a little bit of a grayish color in here. There'll be careful you don't want to hit the edge of the little legs too much. Or else it will really bleed too much. And see you can clean it up again. There we go. So now if I just do a little squiggle, looks like he's flying a little bit. And a little goes a long way with that. Again, turn it sideways. You can pull up your alcohol on there and clean that up if you decide it was just a little bit too heavy. And then I decided just to put a couple more highlights in the wings and the eyes with a gel pen and we are finished. And so he's about ready to fly away.
8. Stippling Techniques painting a small Coneflower: Alright, so let's try a couple of techniques here. I'm going to start off with just a drop of that paint from T-Rex. And then I want to show you a couple of techniques that I like to use. First one is going to be the stippling technique, and the second is going to be our lifting technique. So the first thing we wanna do is take that guy and just spread it out using just a clink UTEP. And I'm just creating those little shapes of a cone flower. No brush, just a Q tip. That loop like little rack top is what it's like to me. Almost like a rail head of hair down. And I can just move those inks around using that Q-Tip. Just getting a basic shape in there. And then we're going to work with that. Now for the top of the flower, this is going to be a cone flower that we're practicing and we'll be doing a larger project near the end of this course. It's been a little drop of that yellow in there. And again, using that same Q-Tip, I've spun it over to the other side so it doesn't turn all paint, but I do want to pull in some of those pink tones in there, creating a little cone shape. And now for some stippling using my black Sharpie. And you can, you can create lots of little dots on here for stippling or you can do more of a hash mark which the cone flowers to now have those little spikes on them. So I'm actually going to do a little up and down lines and I am following the shape of that flower, so they're not completely straight up and down all the way. They are going to fan out across the top of that in all directions. They're more upright in the middle and then rotating it a little bit as that flower turns on the edge. And then we can add, creates more little dots or more stippling down around the base of that. And then add a few more on the inside. And I'm doing a little dotting motions. I'm just tapping that pen down. These don't have to be perfectly round. They can have other little shapes to them, little squiggles. And I'm just creating some darker values in there. And now the more lines I put in, the more dots I put, the darker that gets. So those are gonna be those shadow areas. The less than ideal in the further apart that I have those and more light appears to be in there. Those yeah, fuzzy that looks now so easy. And grab a little white gel pen now and we're going to continue to do some dotting or some stippling in here. And this will give you some real bright highlights. You're not gonna notice it quite as much above the white of the UBO paper, but you'll see it wherever there is a little bit of color in creating just a little bit of light and highlight in here. And go around that edge at the base of it as well. Across the top, looking more like a flower. So now I'm going to use a little bit of alcohol. I have my little pump alcohol. I love this little things. I just pump up a little alcohol and use the very top of it. It's got a little tray on their snap shut. It stays nice and they're nice and doesn't evaporate in there with a container which is lovely. And if you want to, I'll give you guys a link for the I'll give you a link for that too. We'll put that in here. It's listed in my Amazon chop down, taking that Q-Tip, turning it sideways with some alcohol and not a lot. But you can see I'm using that swiping motion and lifting some of that ink now. And I can sharpen out, I've got the one with a point on it. These are made for eyes that Q-Tip fries. So they have a nice little point so you can really use it to give some precision to your petals. And then I want to really late on the edge here. So let me give you some really soft ones on the outside. And because we've got more alcohol, I'm here. Those are going to be a little bit lighter than the ones in the front. How easy to make a pedal? Pretty. So for our last project, we're gonna go into a little bit more detail, but this is a really simple comb flower. And you can see how fast you can, you can create these. So just a couple techniques and stippling and the lifting and those you can use a lot in your alcohol in paintings. And I'm again, I'm using that same Q-Tip. I've put a little green on here and I can make myself all little stem. And this is code peeking through or those petals are, and maybe addled this little touch of the green up in here. Just for another value, another shade of color. Again, it's a real dark around the edges here. And then if you want, you can do a little stippling on that stem. As to feel dot here and there again, given a little texture, a little fuzziness. And there we have it.
9. Adding A Honeycomb Texture: So another technique I want to show you is how to create your own little honeycomb. And really what the painting isn't finish or complete without a little bit of a honeycomb, right? So this is a really easy way to create that texture, that pattern in your paintings. I've cut out just a little bit of my bubble wrap and you want to flip it over so you have the ability side facing up. And then I'm just dropping in a couple of those yellows that come with the T-Rex kit. You don't eat a whole lot of inch. And we're going to practice this a little bit because you can really carry a really heavy texture, which does not give you a lot of defined lines. Or you can do it almost dry so you get a lot more that define lines of the circles. But it's a little bit lighter. So you can play in practices and see what your favorite is. So I'm gonna go very light on the black. The black will tend to take over really easy. And I do have a large drop here. I'm just going to wipe out one up, I think adding a little bit of alcohol only because I want to keep it fairly in light. And we already know from past experience that alcohol tends to lighten your alcohol inks. Let's pick up a little bit of that black. You can see how much that is on, on your paper towel. He can even tap some of this out if you feel like it's a little bit too heavy. So let's go ahead and just visit. Very wet. So let's go ahead and place it down on our UFO paper and just pressing lightly. And if I lift up, you can see you don't have a whole lot of definition here. But it's tills are really cool. It almost looks like little bees all swarming around in your honeycomb. Let's try it again and do it a little overlap, a little bit more again at that, ink is still moving quite a bit. So it's not real defined, but it creates a beautiful background. So now this is drawing a little bit, and each time I do this, I'm going to get a little bit more definition and a little bit less of the ink and the ink is drying as well as I'm doing this. So again, depending on what your preferences you might like, it very heavy, might like a little bit. And you can see as I go over some of those wet areas originally, I can lighten them up a little bit more fun. Does it look like Honeycomb to you? So practices a couple of times and see what your preference is. You can see as I go over this a little bit more, you get a little bit more definition. It gets a little sat more saturated with the inks. And I can lift in Peel often appeal. And I'm still getting a little bit more of that texture in here. And I really like that last one, just that little hint of it in there and they're pretty How cool is that? It, it looks like a honeycomb to me and I think this would be great for a mixed media piece. So I thought, you know, I did this other one. We did some demos on here. I added the B, so we might as well add a little bit of this honeycomb to it as well. So this piece is a little, still, still a little dry so you can see it looks cute, but it just didn't show up quite as much. So I'm going to add a little touch of juiciness here, a little bit more alcohol, Inc. Let's see how this looks. Might be a little too wet. Let's see what happens. I didn't put too much on there, so yeah, not bad. So I think I'm gonna do this little corner, maybe down here on the bottom and a little bit more. And I think I want to balance that up here a little bit, add a touch of it up here as well. It may be a little bit in the middle, a little bit here. It's so cute. Let's go ahead and add just a little bit, you know how you get go and a little bit more, a little bit more losing some of my whitespace. But I really like this look. I wanted to show you what I was doing here because I just think experimenting and playing and coming up with new ideas is just so much fun and it's all part of that process of learning. So when I was originally doing this class for you, I kept building upon it as as I would let things sit for awhile. I've been doing a little bit of the video and then I would add a little bit more and then I'd be like, well, let's try this, let's try that. And lo and behold, I think this is how some of the fun experiments turn into something that you can use later on in many of your, your paintings. And so I'm sitting here, I'm thinking, hey, how perfect be creative, right? It's all a part of the fun and that's what it should be. It should be fine creating should be fun for you. It should be an outlet. So I hope you're enjoying this one. So I am taking my tissue just having Up a little extra because I think I had a little bit too much on there. And I apologize, I forgot to put my gloves on. Again. I got so excited to film it. I didn't have my gloves right here. So good thing is I'm not touching much of the alcohol. I have it on the underneath of this, so and it's pressing a little bit more. Ooh. That's I like the difference between having a little bit thicker, that heavier portion up at the top and then down here on the bottom, it's a little bit more defined. It with some of them at all. I just balances it a little bit more. I think that is it. What do you think? Okay. One more up here. I get missed that top corner there. There we go. So I would love to see your Honeycomb for your next project. If you want to test that out some bubble wrap and remember your bubble or apps will have different sizes too. So that might be really fun to experiment with. And a different size bubble wrap with yours. And I would love to see what you come up with.
10. Alcohol Project 1 - Ink Bumble Bee Masking : Hey everyone, Kelly here. So we're going to try this little bumblebee. I took a photograph of this guy and I did him in watercolor, and I didn't have an alcohol inks. I wanted to really see how it looks so much different between the two mediums. So this was little b was on my loop and flowers during the spring. It was just so cute. So I use some masking fluid and I'm going to place that down. I did this all free hand rather than making sure everything was just in the right place. I love to, to practice and really tried to. I'm challenged myself without doing the drawing, but I will add a PDF in here for you if you want to print that out so you can have it. So I just placed those little shaped petals here and they're trying to mimic the flower to the left-hand side here that I took. So I need to do is get some masking fluid for this one, I'm using the Winsor Newton masking fluid and import it into a separate jar just so that I don't leave the cap off of it to put a little bit in a little jar. And then I worked from that and then add a little bit of soap to your brush and that will help rinse out that masking fluid. Another way to do instead of be expensive brush, you use an inexpensive nylon brush. Or I've done in the past used like the little silicone rubber tip masking fluid applicators or a I've used a calligraphy pen and the pass you've seen me do that, so whatever you're more comfortable with. And then I went ahead and also plates to be shaped in here as well with the masking fluid. And I did have you can see I have a little bit alcohol. Iga always sneaks in places that was on my brush because I didn't rinse it off before I went into the masking fluid. So I have a little bit of green there but actually cleaned up when I remove the masking fluid. So that was a good thing. So I'm also adding any little places I see that y are a little bit of highlight in there. And then I'm going to shape in the leaves a little bit just so I have a little marker as to where they're gonna go. And it does have that little bit of a highlight around the edge of it. So you can, you do see it a little bit of that white. The big leaf here. And this is a little bit difficult to see because you're dealing with like an off-white. They do have masking fluids, have a real bright orange, which is really good if you have a hard time seeing it. I think Winsor Newton makes I want as well. And there's all kinds of brands that you can use for masking fluid, and most of them are really well with Hugo paper. I do find that the Winsor Newton works best when I'm using watercolor paper. However, some of them really stick and they don't want to come off. But this one comes off pretty good. I will say if you're using this for watercolors, don't leave your masking fluid on for a long period of time and try not to use much of a heat gun or a blow dryer to heat it up because sticks a little bit more, It's harder to remove, especially if you leave it on for a long period of time. Was Bupa peppery pretty much do anything though because IPO papers is made out of plastic, so it does not have any issues. As far as that goes. I'm going to add just a couple more in here. And you'll notice I did tape down my UBO paper this time with some artist's tape. So what that is is it's basically you wet it and you stick it down. This test does not come off folks, if you are looking for something to really stick it down there, works really well. The only thing I've found is when went to peel it off, it was really difficult. So i, and abusing an exact a knife and you'll see that the end to actually cut that out. So I have the exact size of that square and it's not perfectly square root. I'm looking at it here. So we're going to put that aside. I'm going to let that dry and then we'll come back and start with our background colors. And I also want to mention if you're new to using the masking fluid, make sure you wash your brush right away and make sure you get way up in there so that it doesn't harden up near where the bristles come out because that will ruin your brush. So get that cleaned out as soon as you can. And so that aside, you can let that dry. Also, you can usually let that dry and a masking fluid dry and old company can peel out rate out once it's dry.
11. Alcohol Ink Bumble Bee Background Pour: So I'm using the T-Rex alcohol inks and I'm using the yellow. You can use any brand Kenyatta would work great or Ranger, what do we have for, for yellows? And I just bladder it on there and everywhere. And just taking a brush is moving that around. The great thing about having the masking fluid on here is you don't have to worry about anything. You can just go to town. So I'm excited. Let's put a little green in here. I like the little spots, but relent some of the alcohol, do its own work here. Try not to get too much green. I'm going to mix this up a little bit. We want to keep some of the yellows in there. You can just take your finger, you have a glove on. This is a really easy way just to spread this out onto your paper. And then we can control the mixing a little bit. Got most of my yellow is gone, but that's all right. We've got real bright, bright green in here, which is what I was looking for because that's going to be most of the leaves in the background. And then I let that dry and I spritz it with a little bit of alcohol just to give it a little bit of texture. Do it again here I'm using the ranger and money mr. For this. And you can use alcohol in this. I don't recommend that you use any of the blending solution in there or the alcohol ink. You have a well ventilated area. That's always good. And if you're spraying this lifetimes all my mask on anyway, when I'm when I'm doing this, just so I don't breathe in any of those fumes. So you can see what a beautiful little texture that this makes you a spritz it again. No, it just gives it a little more interest. I think in there you can see where it's still drying a little bit. Maybe a misprint it one more time. Now if you don't have a spritz or when he's many ministers, or you can just use your brush. It does tend to give you a little bit more drops, heavier drops, larger drops. So if you want just that real fine mess, you can also use a toothbrush and just spritz it across the top. And then I'm just using my finger a little bit just to blend some of that was I didn't want it where the leaves are. I don't want to quite so textured in there because those leaves are pretty smooth. So I'm just using my finger and I can spread that around almost make that leaf shape right in there. Say now I'm going to let it dry. Then we'll we'll come back to it and remove the masking fluid.
12. Alcohol Ink Bumble Bee Removing Masking : So I'm just going to use my fingers. I'm going to speed this up now you do have to make sure this is completely dried when you do this, otherwise you're going to smear some of that ink so it doesn't make sure that you've been given it plenty of time. Tessa, little area. If you find that your inks are reading or smearing on your paper and you're not quite dry yet, so just give it a little bit longer. I also have a little rubber cement tool that I like to use when I'm doing this with my watercolor. But I figured it's just an easy way to kinda pick up some of those little pieces that are leftover. And you just want to make sure that you wipe it really good and get all of that segment or that the masking fluid off of there.
13. Alcohol Ink Bumble bee Starting some details: So I have my arranger palliate because he knew what a nice little mess. This is the monetary side. I loved to use that as my palette. So I'm always flipping that over, mixing my colors on it so it doesn't look as pretty once I put it back on, but the pellet works really good. You can also clean it up using some of the alcohol, but really I just always leave my trays a mess because there's so many little colors in there that you can pick up when you're working on some of those small details. Use your palate. Don't waive all that stuff up because it's reusable, add the alcohol to it. And you can see here I can mix up and reactivate those colors in there. Got a little green in here already. I see you have some dark purple and maybe some black next to it. So I can test my little pillar on the side here and see if I can get something without having to take my eyedropper and premix all of my inks again. So I can just use this and really good, just about most of the colors that I'm using, I'll be using. And then I have my little jar of alcohol here. So it is pop, pop back and it will score it out just a little bit of alcohol. There are some colors that you need that you don't have. You can just pop them into the tray. So I don't really want a nice little dark green. So you can see here, I'm just kind of picking and choosing a bunch of different colors in here. So I'm not really sure exactly what color it is. But a lot of blues and some deeper shades, like purple, things like that with a green, we'll get to that nice dark color and we'll ever green color. Even browns if you have some browns to mix them up. So have fun mixing it and just seeing what colors that you can come up with. It's always fun. So now I'm looking at my photograph and I'm just trying to find some of those darker areas. I'm going to fill those in. Being very careful because I've already removed that masking fluid not to get anything around the white of the flower. I'm just going to curve it around the B here, go a little bit on there. That's all right, we're going to make that black and bright yellow. So I'm gonna go with a little bit of yellow down here on the flower. Again, just a few little highlights here and there. And it's almost like a grayish color in there. Let's go ahead and just recently got yellow on here. We'll just go ahead and put the fuzzy part of the B. And here, again, I've got a really small brushes, his little nylon brush. And I'm just going to paint it great in here. I know a few of you still might be brand new to alcohol ink. So if you put that into your palette to the silent, it dry a little bit. It's, you can control it a lot more. You don't want that to be a really heavy wet ink because it will bloom and then you'll have that yellow going out into places that you don't want it to go into. The same here with a black. And then I'm leaving us a little bit of whitespace here for that highlight in the eye of the bee can see it in a photograph. This is really just looks like a big black circle. It look at it. So you have to always, it's always funny with any, any painting you want to paint what you see, not what you think you see. So if you need to pull up the picture close up and it's always good. You don't want to actually put the I in there. I'm just leaving a little bit of highlight around aware that highlight is or the AI is just giving a little bit of shine because it's basically black. So you don't have to do a whole lot of detail that I it's just that shape and same with a little portion of the abdomen down below. And you can see actually where the leg in the abdomen are in the center underneath there, they're really not very descriptive. It's more blurry, but it's a really small picture that we're looking at. So next I'm gonna just going to paint the wing again more of a black. And then it's got a little bit of that black on the top of them. Now, the shape of the head is a little bit off on this one. I actually like it better with my watercolor, but I'm not going to fuss with it too much here. Just add a little bit of darkness on the underneath. It's actually the flower that comes up underneath him in the photograph. Oh, we'll just tap it a little bit more of the black and we're going to add a little bit of fuzziness to him afterward with the white gel pen. And I can also see where the Ship of the body is off a little bit more and probably a little bit too large for the head area that needs to come back a little bit more. We can do a few little adjustments. Again. It doesn't have to be just like the photograph. He's not sitting exactly the same way. It looks like when I put them in here, There's a couple little legs in there and be really careful with I use a very small brush. You can also use just a black sharpie. Works really good for some of those little legs. If you're trying to do it, legs are antennas, things like that. You can get a nice sharp define line with that. And if you are using a brush again, just make sure that you've got that black almost dry on your brush. You don't want it to be really wax. You don't want that to move too much.
14. Alcohol Ink Bumble Bee more details: Simple little bit of that black still on my brush and I've rinsed it pretty good with my alcohol. So I've got a really light like rain l, So this is barely any pigment at all. And I see a little bit of gray, little bit of yellow in the flower petals. So I'm just going to add a little bit of that shadow. And filling a little bit of that white space, we've got the yellow, got the gray, we've got the white. And it just gives it a little bit more dimension, I think in here. And if you'd like to have the original photograph, you can print that out. It's in the resource section here. So you can have that beside you while you're working on your painting. And don't forget, I also have the printable PDF version of the sketch in there as well under their resources. So you can print that out and have that with you. See, you'll notice I have a little bit of a ground here and I'm mixing it in, putting it in with a little bit of that yellow, which really works well together. I'm trying not to touch the green too much getting around the edges of these. And I don't want to cover up all my whitespace, so I have to be careful I keep my highlights in here. I think that's it for that part. Let's go back into the green. I'm going again, just add some little bit of darker areas to some of the greens. It's all seems to be pretty light, so we want to have a little bit more dimension in here. You'll notice that actually is not green and behind him It's actually my multidose brown, but I don't really like the brown. So this is just to do a deeper green behind him. And then I'm going to grab a little Q-tip. And because I didn't want to leave that stock here pretty light, I'm just going to blend it just a little bit. It's actually a very light, light green, but it's I don't wanna make it too dark, but I didn't want to have a blend into the background, so I'm just making my route a little bit lighter. And sometimes I'll do this one. I'm not quite sure what I want yet using that Q tip and I'm just with the alcohol just 91 percent alcohol like Q-Tip. I just went in and just blended that just a little bit to get a little bit of color. And then I can kind of determine if I want to make a darker, I want to make it lighter, what I wanna do with it. And off to the side here I've got a little bit yellow on my palette, so I'm going to grab a little bit of that with my Q-tip. So you can see have a little bit of color in there and add, just continue to add a little bit of a tint to it. Could also expand out if you find that you're edging on that wasn't really crisp and clean when you're filling that in. And I love these little Q-tips. They have a real nice point on the end of one side and the other sides are really flat. Let me see if I can find the name of that for you. Hey, go there by friend Wilson, they're called IT so they have that real nice point on one side. So now I'm going to soften some of those highlights. Again, they just seem too bright, too wide. So that's it. That's the thing about we're using the masking fluids, but we're using a wide brush. You can see that you get a wide white spot is by taking that Q-Tip, it is blending a little bit more, can make that a little bit smaller. Nine, cover those up, blended a little bit more. Which kind of play with it until I get to where I like and I still find that the white is, it's a little too sharp. So I think what I'm gonna do is end up doing some splatter on this. So I can have a little bit softer blend that in just a little bit more and a lot of texture and leaves anyway. So that's why you don't have to make the little dots everywhere, rewet some of that area and blend it a little bit more. I think it's just a little bit too light still, so let's add a little bit more yellow, just a dot, and see if we can blend that a little bit more. Marrying a nice defined edge is a little bit more narrow now, for that highlight, several of them. What we here too, I like the texture it creates. Let's be very careful not to put too much in there because I don't want that to bloom out too much. And you can see where it's really changed the color. I've got another shade of green in here now. Let's see if we can soften those edges just a little bit. Here we go. Again, I got a little bit of texture in here. We're going to do a little spritz so that we'll cover some of that up. And then while I have a little bit of that on my brush, it's still wet. We'll go ahead and put a little bit of meaning and belief. And we could do the same thing for the other side. And I want to thin that out a little bit. I just find that that bright white is just too thick for rate here is within that out a little bit more.
15. Trimming your painting : So in take the MR Again, I'm just gonna cover up the white part of the flower and the B. And I'm just going to give it a little spritz down, down here on the bottom and just create a little bit more texture. And then maybe over here as well. Then we careful with that, Mr. because you don't wanna get too much in there. That's what happens. It gets very blurry, reactivates the whole thing. Always a fun little thing if you're trying to add texture and you have too many lines and you're not happy with it. Now putting a little bit of a spritz on top of it really softens everything. And I just I like that look, so let it dry. I'm coming back in now with my gel pen. I'm just going to put a little piece of paper down here because I don't want anything to smear while I've got my hand on it. And I'm just going to give a little bit of fuzziness here using the white gel pen. I'm trying to get those little hairs inherent and trying to follow the direction of the B. And as I do this, and if you've ever done for before, it's really important to follow the way the fur lies on the animal. So the B actually in near the top or on the head that for comes up and over its head a little bit and I'm near the back, goes towards the back and then underneath it kind of curves around and under. So you can always add a little bit more yellow to this if you find it's just a little bit too stark with that white. And if you'd like the white, you can always give it a spray of the kMer varnish over the top and then add the white gel pen on top. And that will keep that white gel pen very bright white. But I like the way that it picks up a little bit of the soft yellow, especially if it's a wet if your if your inks are wet underneath, you have to let it dry for a long period of time. That will really start to take on the color underneath. And then we'll get to just a couple little highlights again around the eye area. And if you want to thin out those black lines, we finally got him too dark, you can add a little bit of that white on there as well. There's a couple of little, little highlights here and there. Maybe on the wing as well. So there's the final piece. I just want to show you very quickly here the comparison between the watercolor painting that I did and the alcohol. And you can see the alcoholics are just so much more vibrant than the watercolors. And of course, both are very pretty, but both are a little bit different. So it's always fun to attempt if you're, if you've done watercolors before, to try him in both mediums. It's a fun challenge. Now because I used the artist's tape, unwilling to actually use a little exact dough knife with a ruler that has a metal edge to it. Works so much better than trying to do this with a wooden ruler because you get a nice, crisp, clean cut with this. Well, you want to make sure that it's sharp, it hasn't dulled. And just be super careful that you don't cut your home using this. So I went around all four edges here and I give it a little bit of a lip and I want to show you the reason that you may want to leave just a little bit of the tape on there or an edge which some of the artists will do for watercolors as well, is that it gives you a little bit more room for your framing or your matting. So you can take that and you don't lose much of your painting that way, especially if you have a Mac cut to the size. So you can leave the edge, I'm going to choose to cut mine off. And I will say usually when I'm doing this, I think about that ahead of time. What size matting I want to use and I usually do is use a standard size modified by 7, eight by 10, 11 by 14. And it just makes it easier to find your frames for them. And it's a little bit less expensive because they're usually readily available at most art supply stores. So you don't have to go to a special frame shop to have one cut for your painting. One thing I learned after painting for many, many years. For this project, we're actually going to mount this one to a cradle board. So I want that to be a square shape and I'm actually going to pull out my self-healing mat here and get this cut a little bit more precise. Because I have a couple different sizes. And right now I'm not a 100 percent sure. I think I'm going to go with a six by six inch cradle board for this.
16. How to Mount your painting on a Woodlen Cradleboard: We are going to mount our alcohol in, could be painting onto a wooden crate, a board. If you are not familiar with wooden cradle boards, they come in all different sizes. They come in brown, that come in square, rectangular, and they all have a different size, width on the side panels. So the first thing we wanna talk about is the cradle board comes as just raw wood. So we need to seal that would in a so that nothing leaches into our other paintings. So the first thing I'm going to put on here is some GAAC 100 or GAAC 100. And what that's going to do is it's going to seal our wood panels front and back and the sides. It's going to prevent it from warping. Especially if you're using heavy pours from acrylics or you're using them for watercolors. You don't want to lead your turn, your paintings yellow. So sealing the wood is very important step. Now for alcohol inks, you are dealing with a polypropylene if you're using you Bo paper, which has a nice seal itself. But I like to prep all my boards ahead of time no matter what substrate that I'm using. So they're ready to go when I'm ready to use them. Now while I'm doing this, I am looking to make sure there are no imperfections in the wood. And if I need to sand anything down, I do that prior to putting the varnish on top of that got 100 on top for sealing, paint, all of the sides, front and back. And let that derive completely before taking the next step. So I have all my boards down. You can see they have a little bit of machine to them. Now I'm ready to cut down my painting to size. I want to, I want to give this one a little quarter inch all the way around. So I'm actually going to cut this down a little bit smaller. And other thing I'm using here is my ruler with a metal edge, and I'm using a very sharp tool to make sure that I have nice, clean, crisp edge when I cut this. You may also notice that I have a self-healing mat below which works really good when you're cutting things down and it's got everything squared off for you so you can get a nice, clean and accurate cut by using that. So you can see I have about a quarter inch all the way around here and I wanted just to frame that out. So this is why I'm leaving this and I like the raw look at the raw wood. You can also use any varnish to seal it and you can stain your wood. If you'd rather have a singular, you could even paint it black. So there's many options that you can go with. Now, you want to seal your alcohol in painting with some Kmart varnish, give it a couple very light coat. You don't want to go thick on it to light coats, let them drive up 15 minutes in between. And then you wanna do a couple of codes of the UV protectant just to help those inks that they don't fade. Now, it always is recommended that you leave your alcohol inks out of direct sunlight. So make sure that you're sharing that if you are sending your work off to someone else. So the next thing we wanna do is use some adhesive spray. We're going to get a nice thick coat of adhesive spray on the back. This is ready to go now, this might be a little bit too heavy, so some of it may seep out a little bit. And I do have a little bit here on the edge, so I'm just going to make sure I have that right where I want it. And then lightly let that drop-down on and then push that data. You can use a ruler or Breyer to get a really good seal on this one. This was the smaller ones, so it's pretty easy. I can just take my hand and basically move it around with a cloth and and get that to be a nice flat surface and cleaning up just a little bit of the glue that is on the edge and I want that to dry on there. Let's remove that now with a cloth. And then what I want to do is push down on that, make sure I've got a good seal everywhere. And then we're going to flip this over. And you can either apply some heavyweights to it. You can apply books, whatever you have laying around. But we're going to leave this upside down, let that dry overnight just to make sure that that glue is completely sealed on there. So here it is. 24 hours later, you have a beautiful seal. I have my nice little shimmer on there from using my camera varnish and I like plugins and leave my edges raw. And just a beautiful suite level painting.
17. Project 2 Coneflower - Sketch and masking Coneflower : So for our final project, we're going to create a more realistic looking cone flower. I've added a pdf here for you that you can print out. And I've gone ahead and sketched mine already and I'm just going to show you how I add the masking fluid. It really quick and easy way to do the sketch is to print it out and just take a dark colored marker and sketch that in. And then maybe has put that up next to a window, tape it to the window and then take your UPA paper and place it right on top of it and get it situated to where you want it. Tape out over the top and then you can very easily traced that and sketch it in. Now I will say when I sketch this, I used a watercolor pencil, which was a bad idea when I went to pour the alcohol, any gongs, I lost some of my sketch. So pencil is a good one for this because it's very dark color and you're going to be going over most a bit. So I have just added a little bit of soap to my brush. And the reason I do that is so that it doesn't ruin the brush when you add the masking fluid to it, masking fluid dries fairly quickly and it will get up into the fibers of the brush and does not come out and can ruin your brush. So I always use a brush that he is not one of my most expensive brushes just in case I don't print it out in time. So I'm using some Winsor Newton masking fluid. It has a little bit of a yellow tint to it. Not much of 12. It might be a little bit difficult for you to see, but I pour it into my little separate glass container. That way I don't leave the lid off for a long period of time and I use a little bit at a time. So you're not using a whole large amount again because it dries fairly quickly. And you do want to give that a light stir, not a shaped piece. You don't want it to have lots of bubbles in there. So just give it a nice stir up and down to make sure that it's mixed nicely before you start. And then I'm just gonna go ahead and fill all of this in using my brush. And the reason I'm doing this is I want to make it easier for an idea that wet and wet background. And we practiced a couple different types of backgrounds. So you can choose the background that is your favorite. For this one, I'm gonna do a little bit of the whisk Venus and then I'm gonna do some pouring so you can see how the two of them work and they really you can use either or both of them together. So when I got up to the top of a here, I was contemplating whether I wanted to leave just a little bit of space in here. So some of that green kind of peak through which it does in the photograph. So I look just a little bit and you'll see once I remove the masking fluid where the masking fluid was not. And then immediately after I was done, I went in and Ernst off my brush and it all came out. It's very important if you rent off right away, don't let that harden or set. And you have the soap on there a cleans up a really nicely, give it a little bit more soap, rents it out. And if any of the pieces have started to hardening can easily peel them out at that point. But it's important that you do your masking fluid fairly quickly. If you're going to use a brush or I do recommend, like I said before, the little nibs that are rubber silicone and you'll have to worry about any damage to your crush.
18. Wet in Wet Background: So backgrounds can be one of the most simple things you can do with alcohol inks. For the colors, I'm going to be using glacier blue, irish moss, and sunshine yellow. And I may add a little bit of the title blue and also the Jurassic green for the background. So I'm going to start by just dropping in the color. Now we have the cone flower completely masked out, so we don't have to worry about getting any of these colors anywhere they're not supposed to be. So starting off with just a drop and a half, that's the job of sunshine yellow and also the glacier blue. And then I have some I'm blending solution that I'm going to add to this. Just dropping in a little bit. And like we practiced, see how it's going to blend and move. Rotate across your page and you can let that do that by itself more organic. But you see how I have a little bit of Stripes, little bit of spindles. Someone take my little blower and just mix some of that together. And again, I want to work fairly quickly and then sections on this because I don't want the edges to dry much because I want to be continued to add around this. So if you have been using alcohol inks in the past, you may have noticed that what happens is once it dries, you can see how that will then push that ink aside and creates a lighter shade underneath. So if you want that more organic look, more smooth, wet and wet look. You want to keep your inks wet until you've finished your background. Otherwise, some of those dry areas are going to lighten. So you can see I'm getting a little ridge here. We continue to work that this is still slightly wet, so I can blow this around and smooth those out just a little bit more. But you say I do have right here and there's a little bit of a ridge. Sometimes I'll take my finger and just move my finger over it and help remove that ridge that way. So this is more like that first one that we tried using that very wispy look at adding the alcohol, are adding the blending solution and moving things along. Now on this side, I'm gonna do this a little bit quicker and we're going to do a little bit more of our ink. Ink is going to stay wet a little bit longer. And this is going to blend little bit easier. So I have the Jurassic green down here. It seems like it's a little bit darker. Now you don't even have to use this blower if you don't want to do it this way, you can do more of a pouring effect. And the pouring effect, we'll use a little bit more ink and it will take you a little bit longer for that background to dry. And if I tip this up, all that ink is going to run. So I'm going to add more ink on here. This is the glacier blue again. I'm going to go a little heavier this time on this side. So you can see I'm dropping not just one, but all over the place. And we want to keep this nice and wet. Again, I can move things around, push it. Let's dump a little bit of the blending solution on here to get a nice and wet. And you can see how much thicker the inks are on this side. So now when I take my finger and I have decided that it's just not moving enough for what I want. And you can see I have my table underneath. I don't have anything actually underneath here because I wanted to leave a little white space around the edges. So I gotta be careful. I don't want to tip this up and dump it because then it's going to run off the edges. So I'm containing the Incan a little bit more. Again, taking my finger, just moving this around, try not to lose all of that yellow. I can pick some up almost with my finger and just drag that right over. A little bit more blending solution. So see how this starts to dry that bleeding solution does pushes that other color out of the way. It makes it a lot lighter. But my background in the original pebble lot of texture in there. And we're gonna do some things at the end. So let's see if I have a little planning solution up here. If I can soften that edge just a little bit more and just taking my finger and moving that around. So you might give it a little bit of air, move it back this way a little bit more. So the edges are a little bit not quite as harsh. Now there's a lot of ink up here at the top still. And you can see that it's still quite wet. So try not to get a lot of ink on the area that the flower is because really it's going to waste it because you're going to end up removing all that with your masking fluid. So keep that in mind. Although at the top of the cone here, I did have a little bit of areas where I left the masking fluid off so that green could pop in through there a little bit. Like the streaks that that's making here. Again, it just gives a little bit more texture. Some folks loved just that very soft flowing look like a wet and wet background will give you. So without using any air, just tipping your paper and letting it flow naturally, you can get a very smooth surface. So it's all in what your preferences. And see if we get rid of them. Some of those little spindles here. There we go. See how that just softens those edges really nicely. And so I think I'm going to let this go ahead and dry, just hitting this little corner here and a little bit more blending solution to soften it. We'll let that dry and then we can come back and remove the masking fluid. Now, depending on how thick you have your alcohol inks, it might take a little bit longer to dry. It depends on your humidity. All those factors are always a part of when you're working with alcohol inks. So make sure that it's not tacky or sticky to the touch when you go to remove the masking fluid.
19. Coneflower Details: All right. So I have removed all of the masking fluid. And you can see my cone flower is green. This is the first time I've tried sketching with a watercolor pencil and using them with alcohol inks. And it was like I said, not a good idea but, you know, I left it inherited and review this. I figured this is the kinda stuff that you need to see and it's okay because we're going to be able to go right over it. Now it might tint your alcohol inks just a little bit, but as you continue to maneuver those inks around, you can wipe off your brush and you can really lift those, that green right out and you can see that's what I'm doing here. So I wipe my brush off and then I can just continue going over this. So note to self, do not use the water-soluble pencils when you're working this way. It doesn't work well with masking fluid I found. So you see, you know, even after years and years of experimenting, there's always new things that you've learned. So I'm going to fill this in and I am adding a little bit of alcohol, isopropyl alcohol to my pink. And the pink that I'm using is the Shiraz read. So sorry, is the dragon fruit pink that I'm using? And you can see how light it is. It almost looks like the color that's in the original painting that I or the original photograph that I have up here, minus that little bit of green that we have in there. And it almost see a little bit of a purple hue and they're now that I'm looking at it. I have this up on my iPad next to me as I'm painting, but I just like to use them as a reference photo, especially with the petals of flowers. I just don't have the patience to paint every single highlight and every single petal. So i'll, I'll just glance at it and I kinda get a feel for how those petals are going and where in the light and the dark is. But I don't get too hung up on it being exact because that is really part for me. That's part of the process and part of the fun and impainting. It's okay to have it look exactly as well, But I, I find it more freeing and it actually takes me less time to do some of my projects that way. And I have more fun doing it because I'm not in that headspace where it has to be perfection. Again, that is just me if you like that perfection. And obviously you want to do, do you know, there's no right or wrong with art? That's the best thing about art. If anybody tells you you have to do something this way, then that's probably not the person who should be listening to. You know, there's always those things you should do, things that are more helpful. But it's really about experimenting and just enjoying the process. I cannot say that enough, and that's just how I teach. So you can see I have a lot of green on this little section here. But that's okay. We're just gonna go right through it here. In a little bit more alcohol and I can actually clean that up. Now because it's a water color pencil. This is the Durbin pencil, which are an intense pencil. So they stain a little bit more than regular watercolor pencils. So I should preference that these are underwent pencils, not a regular watercolor pencil. And once they dry, they become permanent. So that our new pope paper or as you put paper sack, glossy, shiny finish. Because I had not tried those with U-boat paper. I've done tons it with watercolor paper without an issue, but the UPA paper just has that different texture, that smoothness to it. And it is polypropylene, so it just reacts totally different than a 100 percent cotton paper. So you can see I can just move that green rate aside. This is a little bit lighter, so I might want to go in with a little bit darker shade. I added a little bit on this time of the Shiraz red to it. Here's a little bit of a close-up. You can see it's quite streaky. But it gives you that apparent of those petals in there. I apologize, I didn't get the last few petals there with that red, they just fill them in. It looks like my camera ran out of memory. So back on before I got too far, which was good. So now that we've let that dry, the petals dry, it's very streaky. We're going to go back in a little bit later and just touch him up a little bit more. This is a little bit not quite as soft as that first one that we did, the practice one. But we're going to take that same technique with lifting and go back into the petals and looked at a little bit more in a later, later time. So now I've got my yellow again. And I'm going to just highlight just on the tips here where you can see more of that light. And because I have a lot of that green in there, I'm actually going to go back in with a gel pen a little bit later to give some more highlights, but start with the yellow. And again, I'm not, not getting the exact detail. This is more of an illusion. If I were doing this in watercolor, I might get it to be a more exact, but with alcohol ink I just find alcoholic is much more freeing that way. And where it just has a mind of its own. And you can play a little bit more with it. You can do that with watercolors as well. When you're doing that loose style, but I tend to paint quite tight with my watercolors. I'm working on that trying to loosen up. It's part of my challenge for 2020. So I've been having fun with that. So try not to hit that green too much. I want to leave those darker areas in there. You could say I've picked up a little bit, It's now blending a little bit more, but I'm going to add a little bit of green down in here as well. I'm being careful not to go too high here because it will reactivate that background. Just a little touch of it. And I think I'm going to leave it like that. Let's go into the red, the Shiraz red. And I'm using just the very tip of my brush. You can see how there's a little bit of red in those. I guess you would call I don't know the little spikes. I share what they're called. But it's got just a touch of that red in with some of the darker areas again. So I'm just tapping in a few little red dots here. They're more like little line the most like those hash marks, little short ones, smaller than what we use when we did the Sharpies, a black sharpie. Okay. So you're just getting a little bit of light that's on the ends of those. And I wanted to mention I am using so far just a number two for all of us and I'm using that tip, it's a round brush but it has nice little point to it. So again, depending on the size that you make yours, you know, if you have a smaller painting, you'll probably want a smaller brush. If you're doing a larger sized painting, you want to go with a little, a little bit larger brush. When I say small, I mean something that's like a 5 by 7 medium would be like an eight by ten. And this one, I cut my UPA paper but I didn't size it, but it's larger. It's more of a square. I think it's more like a 14 by 14. So now I'm going in with a little bit of that green. Again, the Jurassic green. And there's a couple little stems, you can see they have those little flips and their little petals that kinda peek out. We're going to add some of that just to the base. And then again we have a little bit more green in here. So I'm gonna go in with that same hash mark and just pop in in between some of these. Now what I'm doing this, my ink is not a really, really wet. So if you're a beginner, you're probably wondering Kelly, What do you mean by it's not wet dry ink. So when I, when I say that, what I mean is put the inks in your palette, let that alcohol evaporate a little bit. More alcohol in it. The die, the more it's going to spread and bloom and move. Less alcohol you have if evaporates, it's left with just the dire, just the pigment. So that dye is what I'm talking about. You can actually brush it on and really control it if most of that alcohol has evaporated. So that's what I mean by dry alcohol versus that wet and wet or it's very loose. It's similar to, again, I keep talking about watercolor, but it's similar to watercolor in the respect that the alcohol is the water to alcohol inks. So the more water you have with watercolor, the more that pigment it's going to move and flow across your page. And it's the same with alcohol inks. The more alcohol you have in that, the more it's going to bloom and spread. The less alcohol, the more control you have with it. And just tapping it in here, just adding some different shades. And it doesn't have to be perfect if you wanted to do every one of those little pin drops on there on the tip of those flowers. You could do that with just the masking fluid to leave it really bright and light and then go back in with just the yellow if you wanted to. Again or this for this project, I am just having fun with it and just tapping it in here and not worrying about the exact midst of it. And the thing about the human eye, it will fill it all in for you. You know, I almost tell you, tell people to look at that painting sometimes from a distance and squint your eyes and you'll see it's very blurry here, most like dot matrix. And when you do it that way, you're just adding in color where you see the color. It doesn't have to have that precision. I'm just cleaning that brush up. You can see I've got a lot. It's very muddied. Like alcohol and my little jar here is getting a little dirty. But I just want to have just a little bit alcohol on here just to lighten some of those yellow drops on the top there. And be careful you don't want to hold alcohol cause you don't want to get any blooms. And I'm going to actually do that here in a sec. And that's why I'm telling you be careful. Because I looked back down and I had a big dot right in the middle where I added too much alcohol and it just tend to spread. You can see it's starting to form right now underneath. I'm trying to blend it a little bit more. But what happens is I end up it moves too much and then I end up having to go back in with some color once it's dry. So you can see I've moved on to the edge here because I have it's just too wet in the center. Going back and I see him, I can blend it a little bit more red to it. As tapping and blending. You'll notice if I get too much green on there, I always pick. I have a paper towel in my hand and then I'll just wipe off some of that color and then go back in. Also do that if I have too much alcohol, my brush, if I put it down and I find that I'm getting too much of a blooming effect. I'll wipe off some of that alcohol and then wipe it off on my paper towel and my hand that I don't have too much on there. And I'm gonna go in here and just fill in this light green and the stem. One minute for that top portion to dry a little bit. And it has a little bit of animals or red tint on the side of it. And just blending in a little bit of that. And then goes darker on this side you can see where that shadow is of the green. I'm going to fill that in there. Now my stem is not very long and I apologize, I think I cut off just a little bit at the bottom of it, but it's not much. This one's a pretty good size painting. And then I'm just dabbing it a little bit of texture in here. You can see where it does have some or all of the little white highlights. You can barely see them, but there's like little hair, fine hairs on the stem. So we're gonna go back and once that dries a little bit with a white gel pen and create some of that texture with the hairs. But for right now while it's drying, let's go back to our little bumblebee. I can I forgot him up there. He's hanging out. They're all highlighted. Just a couple little circle. The other one looks almost like a little heart. Like cute. I went to go back in there and I can see my brushes dirty. So I need to clean that up and get some fresh yellow here. I'm just going to pop some on my UBO paper. I love to use IPO paper as like a little blending tool is my little palette. It works wonderful because you can always reactivate the color is just like you would on a regular palette. Also, porcelain plates work really well for mixing and it really easy clean up. The only time alcohol and cool my clean off of porcelain is if you are using some of the mixing tips. So just keep that my views the gold or using any of the pearls that does not come off because they actually have that mixed in there and it sets the same with white. White will not come off either. Again, that's met some fixative silver, white, black, black, black stains black will come off, it will reactivate, but that one stains a lot. Okay. So wanting him just a dry a little bit. And then we're gonna go in with some of that black. So I've got it on my brush and it's a waiting that's part of letting that just kinda air dry with alcohol dissipate a little bit. So I don't want that to bloom all over the place. And let's get the little head in here. And you can see it almost looks like a little heart shape again, his face or the eyes are and then he's got a little tough of black up on the back end like he's hanging on for dear life on that little cone flower. And I will do the wing is shaping it out. And again, if you feel more comfortable using a black sharpie or a small Micron pens and things like that. Feel free to do that. It will give you some thinner lines that I'm using the very tip of that brush, just the point and not putting a lot of pressure on my brush because I don't want to use the belly of the brush for that. Just want the very tip of that brush. And that will give you that real small line. Especially if you have a good brush. Some of the a, nylon brushes work greatly, so have a nice point on them and they're very stiff. So it's, you know, you can pretty much use whatever you have. I usually don't use my nice watercolor brushes. Some of these brushes are very expensive. So I'd recommend if you're brand new to it, and you don't want to take the chance of damaging your watercolor brushes, you use a little bit less expensive brush. All right, up next are the final details.
20. Working with gel pens: All right, We are ready for some final details. So I grabbed that sharp peaks. I want to have some very fine lines and you can see the big difference between the brush and the Sharpie. You can get a lot more little details in here. So I'm just making some little marks in the wings. Again. Just little scribbles in there. Yeah, Just a little bit more detail on that backside. He's got one last little band of black back there. And then I could add just a few little squiggles in here for some little fine fuzzy hairs. And then I've decided I'm going to add a little bit of depth in here because it almost looks black in some of these little areas where there's just no light getting down in here. So I can take that, again, that detail pen and just create some dark values in here and some little line work just to outline some of the, the sharpness on that pedal. And you don't need to do a lot, a little will go along way. So again, just outlining some of those petals down in here. So it's really dark. And then we can do some of those little hash marks that we had done on the first cone flower demo. Just a few of them in here. And just creating a few little lines. I'm not going as heavy as I did with the first cone flower because we've got a lot more color in this one. But just a few of those lines here and there. And it will give you that real dark value that we're looking for. Can see how that makes up pop just a little bit more. And then on the edge you can create a little bit more of those lines. They're a little bit more obvious and maybe a few more up here by the B. So since each one of these marks is done one at a time, you can see it takes him a little bit longer. And you can make some little dots in here as well. Now in some of these are going to be longer than others. Again, on the side, I tend to have it a little bit longer in the inside here they're very well, short, short strokes or little dots. Hi. So I hope that you don't mind. I left all of that in there. That was basically in live. So it does take some time with the black, but I wanted you to see where I'm just adding it here and there, just little touches. So did take some time. So now I'm gonna go with my white gel pen. I'm going to add some highlights to be in the wings. And again, just a few little marks here and there. See where I'm just barely touching it, just outlining just very, very slightly. And then they can do the same thing here to get that a real bright white. Just a few little highlights here and there on some of the tips. And if you look at the flower again, you squint your eye. He can see where there's a couple that are really light, light yellow to really not white, but with a gel pen, that gel pens plugging in turn, more yellow anyway. So I'm putting it over. Yellow tends to take on the color underneath. If you want to keep something bright white when you're working with alcohol inks, spray it with a camera varnish to seal it. And then you can add the white on top and it will stay nice and white for you. And then I usually give it another spray just to be safe. So that gel pen doesn't come off. But I don't mind when it picks up some of those colors underneath. It softens it just a little bit. So again, just a little bit here on some of the petals where I lost some of that light. And you'll find I jump around. You do need to be careful that with the gel pens and the Sharpies OP jump around and it's still wet. You don't want to put your hand on it. So normally when I'm working on larger areas, I'll put a little piece of paper underneath my hand. So again, I'm just taking a look at that original photograph and seeing where some of those really light areas are. Just going back in and highlighting them just a little bit. And you can see it just very minute changes, just a couple here and there. Really gives your piece a more finished look. And again, you can take that any little edges that you want to CRISPR or a sharper, more defined area that white will make it really pop. You can see on the left-hand side a, and it really made those petals much brighter. So again, I'm just going to show you the real-time here. So you can see on a little extra strokes that I'm making and just a few, just for a couple of highlights, it gives you that definition of the line. Even though there are light, light pink in there, they're really not white. But again, that color will pick up from the underneath. And then we want to add, we talked about adding a little bit of that definition here on the stem. Those little fine hairs that are on there, just a couple little dots here and there. And I do want to point out here, you can see on the left-hand side, almost looks like a little highlight there. That was accidental again, when I was wiping off the masking fluid, I was using a paper towel to wipe and it just have a little bit of dust or particles. And again, that just smeared over the top and actually lifted up some of that ink in there. And I didn't want to go back into it because if I go back into it, it's going to lose that real soft look and it's going to be more, I'm dotted and it will cause more texture in there. But because I know I'm going to actually create a little bit of it in the background. It's going to really blend in and almost looks like a little highlight actually, which worked out. So, you know, those little happy accidents Bob Ross always talked about. That's part of the, part of the charm when things don't go exactly your way and sometimes those accidents work out in our favor. Now use gotta work with them rather than against them. So I think I'm done with the white gel pen. I do. When I mentioned if he gets gummed up, if you or your ankles a little thick, just have a little scribble PAD on the side and that will help you get your little ball. It's in the gel pen rolling again and the same thing can happen with your sharpie. So just have a little scribble PAD there and you can get your your ink to start rolling again on your pens. Okay. I guess it wasn't done a couple more little dots in here. And you can kinda play with this for awhile. Those little fine details is really what brings everything altogether at the very end. That's by all tend to just work here and there. And I don't worry about the details until the very end. I think a lot of new beginners with many mediums, we'll try to get those details in a little bit too soon. See you wanna make sure you have a base and then build upon that base. And I find that much more free-flowing and much more fun for me. So we're now we're going to do what we did with the first cone flower that we demoed. I've got a little bit of alcohol on there and I just want to soften some of those a little bit more, give myself a few more highlights. You know, when I first did it, I just went in with a color and I remember we had a light green that was in there, so removed most of that green. And I just want to get a few of those highlights back. And not a whole lot of alcohol on the Q-tip. You don't want extremely wet because you don't want it to lift too much and you don't want it to start reactivating those inks underneath and getting those blooms again. You may notice though a couple areas. It happens almost every time to me because I work fast and I'm just just just my personality when I'm painting, I'm I'm in it and my husband calls me a bull in a China closet. Sometimes I just like I move, move fast, I do things fast and so I end up always getting a little drops of alcohol and you can see him on the right-hand side. A couple drops on there. I'm you know, I'm okay with it. Again as just part of the fun of alcohol inks. And now if this were to happen in the middle of my flower, I probably wouldn't leave it and I would go back and with a little bit more color. Easy to do because we've got a lot of details in here and you can cover things up with the background. It's not quite as simple because if you mess that background up, then you'd have to create texture almost everywhere, right? Or else it looks funny, just one area reworked unless you do like little splatters everywhere. Now that can work for you as well. What you'll notice a lot of folks. And I mean, including if I mess something up, that's when splatters become your friend and I just go with it. So because I have those two in there, I decided I was going to create little bit more texture. In here. I was planning on doing a few of those background leaves. You can see that there is definitely some variants of color behind there. And you can see some greenery up the back and the fence in the background and the picture, some darker values in there. But I just wanted to take my little Q-tip again with a little bit alcohol and I'm just going to create some little marks in here so you can see that there's something else going off in the background. There's some other textures going on. Okay, I'm just making some little criss-cross motions here in there. And again, if you wanted to do the splatter technique, it looks beautiful with this type of flower as well. So I would cover your flower before you did that with some type of paper, towel or cloth so that you don't get all those little dots everywhere if you don't want to lose that definition. Although a few little spots and dots here and there can be really pretty too. So again, you're the artist, so it's all about what you like and your enjoyment. So don't ever forget that. These are just a few here and there. And, uh, we have our finished piece.
21. Bonus - Air Flower: So I had a company graphic semi, some Durer bright white paper that I tried out and I figured I would try poem flour on it along with some new alcohol inks made by Funkadelic. And they have like this dichroic color shift in them. So I just got them in and I thought I'd add this as a bonus feature or a bonus section for you guys. And we're gonna create a little cone flower with it. So when you use that same air blower and want to make sure you shake up the psychedelics are really well because they have a pigment inside of it. And it gets a little dummy, so shake it up really well. And by the way, I talk about Funkadelic in the lives zoom conference a little bit more so you can check that out to find out more about the inks and also pulling down below for you on both of those products. So when I add just a little bit of the 91 isopropyl alcohol to this. And I'm going to add the air and we're going to create some little petals. And the free thing about the dura bright paper is that you can actually erase. So this is the fun part. You don't have to worry about it. If you don't like it, you could just wipe it off. And this is my first attempt at a cone Flour using air this way. So this was really fun and you have to give it a try because it's just so, it's so simple and I guess that if you make a mistake, just go right over it. So I'm using my little eyedropper. And again, this is linked down below. We've used this before in some of the other lectures. And it just dropped out. Just a very little bit of alcohol. They come with four different bottles and a couple of different I think it's four different tops to them. So some are a little bit smaller so you can lend out a little bit less alcohol with them. So just going to drop it at close to where the deepest pigment is and then squirt that pedal down. And now sometimes it goes where I wanted to go, sometimes it doesn't. And that's all part of the funneling this one weird offering it to the right. But we'll work with it. And again, if I didn't like it, I can just take some alcohol and wipe that off. So you have to get comfortable with this. Practice a little bit more. I'm gonna be trying this also with my airbrushed. And if you have canned air, go ahead and try with canned air, it's going to be a little bit more powerful than this little wine. So I like this one because I don't have to worry about it blowing everywhere. But you will notice that I have it in a little box. This actually is just a a Birch or to add panel. And I flipped it over onto the other side. And I'm just using the inside of that box. So if I get any of that ink anywhere, it's just gonna stay contain them as blow it everywhere. So you can see this one I add a little bit alcohol to it wasn't quite close enough to that deep purple at the top. So it just didn't quite go as far. And let's just kinda sitting there so that pedals a little wonky. By the way, I forgot to tell you what color I was using for the liquid dichroic. She names these after all of the alcohol, ink or community artists. And this one is it's SAT wise, I think CAD originally thought it was sat tie. Babysits my satire. I think it CT. So I've grabbed my pencil or my brush now and I'm just going to take some of those pigments that are in there and just draw those up into little tiny fine lines like we have on. The large cone flour that we did. So this is looking pretty good, not bad for the first time. Maybe a little stem in here, adding a little green. Again, very small brush. This is my silver brush pen and believe. And it's just a 0. That's very small nylon and dotting into a little bit of the darker shades in here. And just to give a little texture, you could even take a little white pen and do a little daunting in there if you want to look at the axes, what I really wanna show you and they don't turn, you can't see them as well as you can in person. They're absolutely gorgeous. This has got like a color shift and it's got mostly golden hair, but it's got a little bit of Teal, a little bit of paint. And there's just so much prettier in person than they look on the screen here. You can't see all of those colors that are in there and it's just very faint. It's like a little rainbow. And your pedal, it's just beautiful. So I'm gonna take my marker and you can see I had two dot here. I mean, it looked like it had little eyes on the top of my flower. That was because my ink was a little bit too out of my brush, so I get two dots on there, but no worries. Happy accidents as Bob Ross would say, Just gonna go ahead and take that pen and gory it over. And I'm gonna go with a white and the white dots right on top of that so you don't even see it. So if you have these little, little accident, so to speak, don't be too worried about it. A lot of times you can cover them up or just change it around. Just make subtle changes and it all works out. So beautiful little dotting. I love the way this looks in this pen is actually picking up some of those purples from underneath and even looks more pretty. And we'll go a little heavier here. And I can be done. But I'm not because that one petal just I just don't care for it just doesn't look real, real enough for me. So as I'm pondering and here I'm just gonna go ahead and put my little black marker that you can use Sharpies, you can use a chameleon blender pens or chameleon pens, black pens, not the blender at blender will, will move all your inks around on you. The black pen has two sides to it, ones a little bit more narrow than the other. Really nice pen. But again, Sharpie marker works just as well. You could even use a pencil, graphite pencil if you wanted to. Whatever you have on hand that's black. And just getting a couple little strokes in there, just like we did in the other lecture. So I'm gonna show you how this graphite paper or the sub dir, dir bright, I want to say dural. Are, they have dural. Our paper too, which is in black, but HDR Bright is in the white. And I want to show you how this works when he can wipe this off. So we're going to, we're going to actually attempt this pedal. I kept working at seeing if I could just get away with it, see if I liked it. But it just I knew I could do a better job. So after I get this little darkening and here we're actually going to take the bottom of this right now. But again with a little bit of Tosca pan, a little bit of white dotting. And I liked that. I liked the top, but I still in like that one pedal. So you know what that means? Yep. Right there. We're going to go back in a little, little bit of alcohol. And a really need to really fat. I need to go up closer to where that darker pigment is. See how light that is. It's still a pretty petal, but suddenly it's just too bright white are there for me. So then I realize I've started to have some bleed in here in that stem. If you see that green is moving, see alcohol went over it. So this is where I decided I would show you I could wipe it off. So I'm gonna take my little Q-tip here that wasn't quite wet enough on this side and figured that out. But over here, it was see how that just wipes rate up a little green on my Q-Tip. So I've gotta clean that off. Let's go a little bit more alcohol. Go with the other side and I'm just going to soften that a little bit and flip it over. And as it starts to spread some of that green around and it will lift it right out. And you might have to grab a couple of Q tips. One for lifting again. So I've got another one here with that little sharp point. I don't have enough alcohol and then a little bit more it's very tiny little dropper. And I was gonna go with that as a pedal. So I thought, well, let's try it and then we'll see if we can get that to go right up over that. So I'm tipping that app to see if I could get that pedal to go down towards that direction. There we go. I like that pedal butter. So this is pretty as is. I can leave it alone. But because I am testing things out, trying some new stuff, I cannot leave it alone. So I put another drop in here just to see what it's gonna do. Very, very dark. Adding a little bit more alcohol. And I'm going right on the edge again, see if we can get that to move a little bit more. And I probably should've brought that up just a little bit higher. So let's add another drop of it. Give it a second to reactivate some of those inks below and you can see where it's split. I'm going to tip it up and see if I can get that to move. I got there. Yeah, I got portion of it to move. It's almost looks like it's a different color now isn't that fun? Where peaky and less purple? So let's draw another little bit here. And I'm going to try to come over on this side a little bit more. Jan, another drop of alcohol, letting it tilt. And you can't really see that beautiful goal that's in there. But I was trying to get that to move a little bit more as well. And again, I need a little bit more alcohol just didn't quite have enough. There we go. So the alcohol you can see turned it more of that pink shape, but then once it dries, it deepens a little bit more. So this is both be a comb flower, which usually my petals are going down, but I just feel like I need a little bit more over here. So I'm going to have on come out this way to the left a little bit. One kind of curled up on me again. Sometimes I don't go where you want them to go, but just go with the flow. And then to balance that out, we'll do one more on this side. There are I think that's enough. There. I like that better. What do you think? I'm gonna go ahead and try this also with another color for you as well. So I'm just curious. So what these are going to do look so pretty. Okay. One more. Only because I have a lot of that gold. It can barely see it here. But if I hold this up, you'll build see it a little bit better and see if I can get to tilt it so you can see some of those other colors in there. Again, it just doesn't capture it on the film, has much as it does in person. Now they did that. Let's go ahead and just a little bit more of the whites to highlight it again. Say filled some of that area in with some more pigment. And I don't want to cover up again all of that because once I tilt this, you can see the goal that's gonna be in here. So cornflower usually have a little bit more of a point, but I don't know what this would be called. Maybe a Shasta easy. Making up our flowers. That's always fun to do. And again, just with a lecture being a few more of those lines in here. And do one more. Just a few more. My pen keeps getting stuck. So I had to scribble over here on the side on that piece of paper just to get it going again, because as inks are a little thick in there and the pen just tends to pick some of that up. So I want to go up a little higher, so it looks a little bit more like a cone flour. And then maybe come out the sides a little bit more. Just a few of them that could continue working on so much fine. But let's take a look at it here in the lights. If I can get that shimmer to shine for you and you can see it a little bit better. There we go. You see that in there? So pretty. So I'm gonna do one more of these. Here's a close-up of it. I think you can capture, I'm going to capture a little bit more of that teal shade that's in there and see if I can get that for. You. Have to hit the light just right for you to see it. See you become down here at an angle or you can see a little bit. They're mostly see the goal, but they're all in there even looked a little bit of pink. So you have to try it for yourself. If you loved things that shimmer and shine, which I do want to give it a try. Alright, let's give this a go one more time. This time I'm using the color Anastasia and put a little drop in here. And then I'm gonna add a little bit of the T-Rex yellow to that just to see what it's gonna deal and go for that city green colors as the color of our month for our exploration group in November. So I was looking for a way to create that symmetry in color. And the two of these together worked pretty well because it's more strength, more like that. Orangey yellow ish color? I think. So again, I'm just adding the isopropyl alcohol and 91% and blowing it around and find I'm moving my little merch panel, which works really well in here because scientists, I can tilt and I don't have to worry about holding the paper. And I'm not using a whole lot of Ankit, I'm not using whole lot alcohol here. Again, I don't normally have any marketing NEL My hands here. And then create that little stem really easy. I don't worry about the top of that cone flour too much. We can shape that in with our pen. I'm gonna come up a little higher. It's again, soldiers short. And there we have it. Too. So pretty and again, I wish you could see the colors in these. So that is Funkadelic alcohol inks. And if you want to give those a try, I'll give you a link down below. She is actually from Australia. So if you are from Australia is a great little spot to purchase some really fun inks and she does ship worldwide as well. So again, I'm trying to get that angle when the camera to see, see how that those colors in there. And you can see that the teal color, the greens up in there. So I've, I hold it just right and my wheel that captured a little bit better Fourier, Mary Gao. So I hope you enjoyed this extra little bonus and we'll see you in the next lesson.
22. Outro and Projects : What did they think so much for joining me? I am a super excited to have you try out the bumblebee and post your projects. Now, this is your first class with me and the first time we've posted a project, I am super excited for you. I can't wait to see it. If you've been doing projects with me the whole time, I am excited again to see what your bumblebee looks like or your project. Go ahead and try a couple of those backgrounds first and get one that you really, really like. You can kind of play with this a little bit. You can even change out the colors if you want to add some blues in there are some other shades. Feel free to mix and just have fun. Try different alcohol, ink, see what works best for you. And then once you're comfortable, go ahead and post the background picture. Just the background picture just as we can see the different colors and what you're thinking as far as your background. Don't forget to print out that PDF of the sketch. If you don't want to draw it, you can just go ahead and copy or trace that onto your paper using some graphite paper. And then I'll also have the original photograph if you want to use that. So you have a reference rate beside you. And of course the mounting on the credible or is completely optional if you want to just map this in a regular frame or Matt, I'd love to see that as well. I hope to see you in another class coming up real soon. Don't forget, we do have some other online classes and I try to post a new course a month for you. My next one that I'm working on is the wax ceiling over watercolor. And I'm working on mounting that on a cradle board as well for you. I hope to see you soon. Have fun with your project and please don't forget to tag me on Instagram or Facebook once you've completed it so I can see it and possibly share it on my page. And of course, if you'd like to be notified of any new courses coming up, make sure to click that follow button. I also have some YouTube videos every Tuesday on YouTube and of course, e-mail me if you have any questions at all. I'm here for you. I'm happy to answer them. Don't forget to labor re mu, I'll let others know that this course might be something that they might be interested in it as well, that I will see you in the next one. Have a great one. Buh-bye.
Kellie Chasse, 7 Years Teaching on Skillshare!
