Alcohol Ink Techniques for Card Making Class

1. Alcohol Ink Techniques for Cardmaking Class Introduction: Hello, I'm Cheryl. Welcome to alcohol ink techniques for card making. Alcohol inks are one of my favorite mediums to work with. I love how the inks just kinda move and flow. And you can't totally, you can kind of predict some of what's going to happen. But they just kinda do their own thing and it makes it fun to see what happens and to create cards with them. In this class, we're going to be creating seven different cards. Let's go take a look. These are the cards that were going to be creating in this class. Obviously we have a little bit of a butterfly theme here, and the color palette isn't the same throughout, I'm using Ranger alcohol inks, but you can use another brand. I have not used other brands other than some of the Jaccard pin yada inks. But they should work very, fairly similar. Now, you can change any of these colors up to suit your tastes. And you can also change the stamps and dies up to suit your tastes. So you can really customize it to what you like to do. All of these cards will be pictured on the supply list that comes in this class. Then the supplies for each one will also be listed. Those supplies will be linked to where you can purchase them if you choose. But it's also a great reference to see exactly what is used for each card. And that way you don't have to worry about remembering it while you are watching. Now let's go get started. 2. Let's talk about Alcohol Inks & Surfaces: So before we start creating, let's talk about alcohol inks. So alcohol inks are an alcohol with color in them. They come in all sorts of different colors. The the pellet is endless. Basically, you can mix colors together to make custom ones. The ones that I'm using are from Ranger, but there's a bunch of other companies that make them as well. To blend those alcohol inks, I'll be using isopropyl alcohol for some techniques, alcohol blending solution for others. And when I'm using the blending solution, I'll let you know when it's that most of the time it'll just be the isopropyl. Now, I've worked with alcoholics for probably about 15 years now. And in the last I want to say about six months, I've heard people say that you need to use a ventilator when using them. Now, I never have and I've never noticed an issue. But I don't work with alcohol inks all the time. I will do them periodically. I make sure that I have lots of ventilation in the room that I'm in. I share a room with our house furnace. So I'm very aware of alcohol and fumes and being careful and stuff like that. I also tend to rotate different crafts, so I'll do alcoholics for awhile and then I'll go do something else for several months and then come back to them. If you have issues with smells and stuff like that, make sure that you've got good ventilation and if you're more comfortable using a ventilator, absolutely. Do your own research and see what you're comfortable, comfortable with and follow that. Now, they will also stain. So you'll notice I'm working on a black surface here. I clean up between different cards and stuff like that. But if my black surface happens to stay and you're not gonna see it, just be prepared that if you're using a white surface to work on, you're going to have some standing with the alcoholics, so you'll want to protect your surface. Same with your fingers. They will stay in your hands. Now personally, we don't have a dishwasher, so I'm hand washing dishes several times a day. So usually the staining doesn't last very long. But if you happen to not want to get staining on your fingers, use a pair of gloves. So to move the inks around, I have it's actually a hair tool. I've got the curling brush taken off of here. There's two speeds on here. And it's a low temp. So you'd want something that doesn't have a lot of heat to it, but you can control the air. I want low-speed, low airflow, and I want it low temp. For someone starting out, there's something like this as well. This is a great way to start out rather than investing in a whole lot of stuff. I think there's around 15, $20 or whatnot. But they're a great way to move the air around or move the alcohol ink around and have control, but not invest a lot when you're learning and starting out. So for surfaces where you're gonna be using several different surfaces in this class. Most of the time I'll be using Yuko. You Po is a synthetic paper. It's a plastic paper. But it does not like heat, which is another reason to use something that is very low temperature so that you're not going to melt it and warp it. I'm also going to be using alcohol ink card stock. Now this is a glossy coded card stock. It's actually got a clay coating on it to give it the glossy appearance, but it's perfect for alcohol inks. They just look beautiful on it. Some people have had success using photo paper. If you have photo paper at home, try it, experiment with it. Personally, I never liked the look of alcohol inks on photo paper. It just didn't have the same look as alcohol ink card stock, in my opinion. But I know there's other people that use photo paper and are quite happy with it. So it, like I said, if you have it, play around with it and try it, you may happen to have a type of photo paper that works perfectly. Different ones will react differently as well, depends on what they have coating their paper. We're also going to use some glitter alcoholic card stock. So this is meant for alcohol inks. It looks like it's glitter, so it looks like it has some texture, but it's totally smooth. Then we're also going to use some black alcohol ink card stock. Now this paper is really, really cool. It's got a nice sweety finished, so I use it for things other than alcohol inks. But you have to use it in a certain way because alcohol inks are transparent, you can't just use regular ones on the black card stock and expect them to show up. So we'll cover that when we get to that point. Then the last thing I didn't grab the package, I'm also using some clear acetate. Now the one that I'm using is heat resistant simply because I'm going to do some embossing on top of it. If you want to do the technique, but not emboss an image on top of it. You can use regular acetate that will absolutely work. But there we go. Those are the basics. Now let's make some cards. 3. Alcohol Lift Ink Technique: Creating an Alcohol Ink Background: Alright, so the very first card we're going to create is this one. And it's kind of a twofer one with this one because we're going to create this background and then we're going to lift, we're going to use a stamp to lift some of the ink up and stamp it onto glossy card stock. So the very first step is to use, we've got some tuple paper here. So you put paper is a plastic paper. It says synthetic paper, a non porous surface. And we're going to put some alcohol inks on the background of it so that we can lift them up. I've got four different colors. I'm using the same four colors throughout the class. There's one part where we're going to use some pearls, but they're all the same color scheme. So I'm just gonna get some isopropyl alcohol on the back of my UFO here. Now the one thing with tuple is it does not like heat. So I've got, It's actually a hair tool, but it's got to two different speeds on it and it's low heat. You want to use something that has a very low heat to it. Because otherwise, if there's too much heat, it's going to start melting the paper. So a heat gun would not work for this at all because it would just melt the paper. So isopropyl down put some alcohol ink down, and now I'm just putting some more isopropyl on top of it just to get a lot on there to help it to flow. And then we're gonna be using the tool to start flowing that alcohol around. I just use it to direct it a little bit. I'm trying to get a little bit of whitespace left in here. As I move this around is going to start drying around the edges. But if there's an area that's getting too dark that you want to say here, whatever you just use your heat tool to move that anchor around a little bit. Yes, if your tool catches the edge of the paper, it will start moving like that. So you may want to use the fingers are just hold it down. If some alcohol goes behind the paper, that is totally fine and that will actually help it Hold it down a little bit. It's still wet. The inks aren't flowing quite as much, but it is still wet. So I'm going to put a second layer on here. Now, you could, if you liked the way the first layer ended up, you could absolutely leave it with that and use that. I just want to make sure that I have a really good amount of ink in order to lift up for the next part. I also like the texture that you get when you add different layers. So I just put the ink down and now I'm putting some isopropyl on top of them to get them flowing a little bit more. And you can see I put them in rainbow order on the page and that's mainly so that I don't get modify put pink next to the green. It's going to turn brown. Where those inks blend. I'm trying to avoid getting that. It does take a bit if you're new to Alcoholics, it does take a bit to learn how they move and how they flow, what you can do and what you can't do. And then once you learn that, you kinda start trying to break those rules, are trying to see what happens if you do different things, which is part of the fun of it. I didn't have quite as much isopropyl with this layer as I did with the first. It's not going all the way to the edge. It's creating different edges. Which for me is on purpose because I liked the look of that. If you wanted it to go all the way to the edge, you're going to need to use more isopropyl. Just because we're doing layers doesn't mean that once it's dry, it's permanent. As soon as you add another layer, it does start to rehydrate the layer underneath, but it just builds up the ink and the color intensity a little bit. I don't necessarily want that there to be just one big blob. So I'm putting some isopropyl, moving it around. Then I'm gonna do one more layer and we're going to leave it at that. You'll notice I'm not using a ton of the pink and the pink is really quite strong. It has a really almost a neon pink kind of vibe to it, which I like once it's diluted a little bit. But I'm not trying to I'm deliberately trying to not get a large portion of that. A little bit of green. I just put my isopropyl in these little medicine dropper bottles will be linked on the supply list. I liked them because then you can have a little bit of control. If you have a big bottle, it's a little bit harder to control when you pour it out. And even if you use a pipette, I just find this as a much easier. You'll get to learn how much you need to move the alcohol inks around or whatever. I keep going up here to kind of break up a big purple patch. But there will get to be a point where the ink starts flowing and we just need to let it completely dry. And that point is, right now the inks, I'm just going to let them completely dry. I'm happy with how this has turned out. Now what I was going for when I was doing it, because I know that I've got the big butterfly at the top and I know that I've got my sentiment here. And I want to make sure that this is completely covered with color. And I want to make sure I have a decent amount of color here as well so that I have that ink to pick up. If any of that is whitespace, there's no ink to pick up. So I'm going to let this completely dry. I could use my heat tool to speed it up a little bit, but I might as well just let it dry on its own while I get ready for the next video and we'll show you how to lift that ink. 4. Alcohol Lift Ink Technique: Card 1 Assembly: Alright, my ink is completely dry and if you get a point where it looks like it's still wet but it's just not moving. You can take a paper towel, a clean paper towel, and tap it on your surface to see if it's ink is dry. I had a pool here so that I ended up I ended up just lifting that up. So we're ready to move on to the next step. So this here is some glossy card stock. Glossy card stock is a porous paper that's clay coded, so it's got a shiny look to it, but it's not non porous. So this background here, it has to be on a non porous surface. So I'm did it on UCO. You could also do it on a plastic transparency that would work as well. But the ink will not lift off if you use it on a porous surface. So I've got an alcohol lift ink pad here. And this is intended to lift up, to rehydrate that alcohol ink and to lift it up, you do need to make sure that all of this is completely dry before we move to the next step. And then as you can see, I need to make sure that your stamp is completely covered. The ink is glossy so you can see exactly where it goes on your stamp. Press it down. And I like to have one hand stationary while the other one moves around, pressing and around, making sure that I have good contact with that alcohol ink. I'm going to lift that up and then press it onto my glossy card stock here. And I'm going to do the same thing here, hold it in one spot, press it around with the other, just to make sure my stamp doesn't move. There we go. We have a beautiful image now this here. We want to lift up that ink before it dries. So we're taking some clean paper towel. First thing I'm gonna do is just press the paper towel on there. We don't want to rub we're trying to lift up some of that excess lift ink and if we start rubbing, it was just going to smear it around. So clean paper towel lifted up. Get a new point of your new part of your clean paper towel. Lifted up again. We're gonna do that a couple of times until we're not seeing ink come up on our paper towel. So that's pretty good. There's not much left. Once we get very little left, then we can start rubbing. And that's just going to remove any excess and it's just going to clean up your image. Now this part here, that ink was quite heavy there. That's about as clean as I'm gonna get it. If I start rubbing too hard, I'm going to start getting smear like scratches from my paper towel into it. So I'm going to leave that like that. And we'll finish that with the next card. But let's finish this here. I've got my card base all ready. I'm going to glue my blue mat to the card front. And then I'm gonna glue my image piece on the glossy card stock. So I've got some distress collage medium that I'm going with. I like using this because it dries completely clear and it also dries completely matte. So if anything happens to squeeze out of from underneath the layer, you're not going to see it. So we could leave it like this, but why not add a little bit of sparkle? So I'm going to use some stickers. I'm just going to outline the wing a little bit. I'm not being ultra precise, going around the edges. Just to add a little bit of sparkle, which basically just gives it a little bit of a different texture on the card. And in my opinion, enhances it. One thing to make sure of though, when you're using sickles is don't put your hand where you just put some stippled because you will smear it. And then depending on how thick of a layer you get or you put on there is going to make a difference in how long it's going to take to dry. And then the last thing I did for this one here was some Glossy Accents just on the butterfly's body there. Once again, just giving it another texture in the center. So I'm gonna leave that to dry without touching it. But that's what it looks like. So you get some glossy raised area where the body is and then just the sparkle around the wings there. The alcohol ink on your butterfly stamp needs to be cleaned off with a permanent ink cleaner. My favorite one is ultra, ultra clean. But you want to make sure to clean that off? If I were to take that and not clean it off and then say put my alcoholic lifting, I'm going to contaminate my pad, which is what has already happened. So if you want to keep your pad as clear as possible, make sure to clean off your stamp. There's not really any way as far as I'm aware of rehydrating that and getting another stamping out of it. You could miss it with some isopropyl and snap it. But it's going to not be as crisp of an image as what we've got here. So you can do that, but it's not going to clean it completely. And it's going to be more of a watercolor. Look back for a moment. I figured, instead of just talking about it, why not show you what I'm talking about? So I've just got some isopropyl alcohol here. And what I'm going to do is this is the one that I want. I had 70 and I want 99%. I'm just going to miss my stamp here lightly. Then I'm stamping it right onto glossy card stock. Alcohol inks don't really look very nice on regular card stock. They really come alive on non porous surfaces and glossy card stocks. So that's what I meant. So you could absolutely use that and create another card with it and I will. But you do get some spots that are a little bit, I'm not nearly as crisp as our original image. But why not use that ink rather than just cleaning it all up? 5. Alcohol Lift Ink Technique: Card 2 Assembly with Glitter Butterfly: Alright, now let's finish this piece here to create this card. So the background is already done. We did that with the first one. Let's move that to the side. What I'm gonna do now is I've got some alcohol, ink, glitter, stock, my package go here. So this is what it is here. It's meant for alcohol ink and it's got like a glitter print, if you will. It's not textured at all. It's completely smooth. So we're going to, I think this background to create our butterfly accent. You could create a card like this and just leave it as is. Maybe put some stickers and glossy accents like we did with the last one. But I just thought this was really pretty in the center and it just added a bit of extra dimension to the card. So I'm only actually going to use three colors. But I do want to make sure that these are out of the way. Sometimes when I have things sitting in the way, they get an accidental spray or block of alcohol and can we do not want that. So once again, I'm gonna put some alcohol ink on my background here. I said alcoholic, I meant isopropyl alcohol. I'm just doing this over the entire surface of this glitter card stock is going to be die cut. This isn't gonna be for the front of a card, but we want to make sure that the whole surface is covered. That way we can choose where we want to decode or butterfly farm. There's a good chance most of the surface will be covered with just one layer of alcohol ink. But I can always add a second layer if I need it. I'm trying to push that to the edges there. See how that pink really overpowers the blue and the purple. Alright, right away, this is already drawing and this is still wet. And I want to have a little bit more of the blue and purple on here to choose from with dye cutting. So I'm just going to go ahead and add a little bit more of that. Now, for this, I, i, so far I've been using the dropper. I also have some isopropyl alcohol in a misting bottle. And this way I can just wet the entire surface down really, really quickly. There we go. I just wondered that blue in that purple area to be a little bit darker. If you don't like having things like this with this this background just because we're die cutting it, you could spray more alcohol, isopropyl alcohol on the background in order to clear or in order to completely wet the surface. But I like those areas. They just add some extra texture that I think as more interests to the whole abuse. Now, you noticed when I was using the alcohol inks on it, a lot of that glitter texture totally disappeared. But see how things are drying and it's coming back. Just so you know that when you're working with it and all of a sudden you don't see any of that. That glitter and you think something's gone wrong. It's just it does that while you're working on it and as soon as that alcohol dissipates, it starts to come back. Now, before we go any further, I'm going to set that aside to dry. I want to clear in my surface off here, just do that with some isopropyl. And then I just use the paper towel that I used for mopping up the ink for the lift technique. I'm using a dark surface here so that my alcohol ink won't stain if you have a light background, unless it's glass or whatever, there's a good chance that the alcohol ink will stain it. So just keep that in mind. You don't want to be working with a light mat and ruin it by staining it with alcohol ink. I'm going to let that completely dry. I'll see you in a moment and we will die cutter butterfly, right? So our glitter card stock is completely dry, we're ready to die cut. This particular dye has two different dyes that layer one has all the detail and one is just a silhouette. We're going to use the silhouette for this card. I tried to cut the one with the detailed, but this card stock has a plastic coating on the back, which makes it really hard to get all of those little bits out without starting to rip things. And rather than have that frustration, I decided to just go with the solid I'm sorry, I've completely lost my train of thought, decided to go with this all his silhouette of the butterfly. So my butterfly is in this area. I'm trying to pick a color on here that's going to pop out. I don't necessarily want it to completely blend in. So I'm going to pick a little bit lower in the blue areas and maybe have a little bit of purple at the top of the wings in my machine. So the silhouettes are a lot easier to cut out with tricky papers like this that have a plastic coating. But I do still run it through a few times like you just saw, so that it has a better chance of completely cutting and it works totally fine. So this, I keep this and I'll use this for other projects as well. This piece here can just come right out of the die cut. And I love how when you put it through, you get pressed image of all of those little bits there. So it's not just one solid, um, silhouette with no detail in it. I think that just adds to the look of the dye cuts. So I'm going to glue this piece of the front of my card. It's already the right size. I'll put the measurements that you need on your supply list for each of the cards so you'll know what each piece or each card needs. And then for the butterfly, I'm only going to put some glue on the back of the butterfly body. I want to have those wings pop up a little bit and add a little bit of dimension. Then I'm just going to align the body up with the body from the stamped image. Obviously it's not the exact same image and obviously it's not as big. But I like the silhouette of the stamped image behind this one here. And then the other thing I'm gonna do, just to touch it, the glossy accents on the body. Just add a bit of a different texture. There we go. And then we're going to let that completely dry. But I love how the different glitter card stock just plays with the alcoholic background. And they just play off each other. 6. Alcohol Lift Ink Technique: Card 3 Alcohol Ink "Watercolour": So since we just did this piece here with the isopropyl alcohol on this. Now, we might as well turn that into occurred as well. So my front of my card is four and a quarter by 5.5. So I am going to take off an eighth of an inch from each of the sides. Because that image is pretty much centered already. In the end. It's going to be four inches by five and a quarter. Then I just chose a blue card-based for it. To bring out the papa blue in there. You could choose any of the colors that are in that image. Any of those will work. Then let's glue that to the base and I'm going to enhance the image the same way I did the first card. I'm just going to add a little bit of stickers on the outside of the wings. A little bit of Glossy Accents in the center. You could do the same as the second card and do a die cut, the glitter die cut in the center as well. Just have fun with it. It's always nice getting a bonus card when you didn't necessarily expect it. So just a thin line of sickles. And if you don't have stickers, you don't necessarily have to add them. I just like it just adds a different texture to the front of the card. Little bit of sparkle. But I only do a tiny little bit. I'm of the belief that less is more. I think a little heavy, being too heavy on the glitter would take away from it. But just a little tiny glitter line I think is really, really pretty. Just adds a bit of sparkle is put some on the word dream as well, because I like it on there. The font that they use for the word dream has an opening. And it just seems to work well for adding the ********* in there. And then a little bit of Glossy Accents in the center. If that body some dimension and make it pop out a little bit. I'm not too concerned about being exactly where the body is. Close enough is close enough. So I'm going to let that sit aside to dry. But there you are another card made with an extra of stamping up the lifting. 7. Diecut Butterflies Card: Alcohol Ink Background for Creating Butterflies: So now we're going to create an alcohol background, but we're going to stamp and die cut the pieces. What we're going to add is this pin yada opal alcohol ink. Now, it's not a metallic, It's got like a glitter to it. That as is really, really pretty shimmer to your backgrounds. So you wanna make sure to completely shake it up before you use it. I've put it in a smaller bottle so that it's easier to use and to control. So we're actually gonna do this. I'm actually going to do this twice and save the other one for extra embellishments for cards in the future or in the other cards in his class. Sometimes English discard. Alright, so I should have taken the lids off the bottles already, but I didn't. Alright, so our background is basically the same as the first one. I put the isopropyl down, put some alcohol ink down. Now before I'm putting more isopropyl on top of that, I'm just going to add a little bit of this. Opal is already settled a little bit, so you want to make sure to shake it every time you lift it up. I'm not sure if you can see on the camera that pretty shimmer that ads. And then Let's add some more of the isopropyl. No, because we are cutting these out. Really unjust trying for an all over background to stamp and cut butterflies. If you get an all over background with the first try, then use that. If you need to add some more coverage than you can absolutely add some more alcohol to do that. I think this is still wet. I'm going to add a little bit more. The blue, green and the pink is really taking over. I'm just going to add, good turn that off while I'm doing this. A little bit more of the isopropyl just to blend that out a little bit. I want to make sure that I can see my stamped image on top of it. So we don't necessarily want a really dark surface, but I do want to have sections that you can see, our pink sections that you can see our purple. You may notice some of my alcohol ink is going off the page. That's totally fine. Clean that up later. Like I said before, this pink really takes over. So I don't mind if some of it goes off of the page and makes way for other colors. So it's still fairly wet, but I don't feel the need to be pushing the alcohol ink around anymore. I'm just going to close these up and let it dry a little bit on its own. And you'll definitely want to have a little bottle to put this end because the bottle itself is like that and you'll have 0 control if you use it like that, you could use a pipette and take the alcohol ink out of it as you're working. But much easier to have it in a smaller container and be able to control it. Alright, I'm gonna wait a few minutes for this to completely dry and I'll be back. Alright, so my inks are completely dry and I'm going to stamp butterflies over them. So this happens to be a stamp set that has a matching die set to cut them out. You could use other butterflies and then just hand cut them. And I have already placed them so I know they're going to fit within my piece of paper. I'm using stays on ink. You'll want to work fairly quickly with this because it does dry weight quickly. And once again, I put it on my piece, hold it steady with one hand and then press around with the others so that it doesn't slip or move. There we go. Now I have the dyes to go with this, but I can't die cut them all at the same time because if any dies overlap, like for instance, say that if any dies overlap, then I'm going to ruin my die. So they need to be cut separately. So these inks are going to dry while I'm doing this. I'm going to police two of the Di's where I want it to go and I'm going to tape them in place. The one thing you wanna do though, when you're taping them in places, don't take them over another stamped image because you will lift a little bit alcohol ink up and hence some of the image. So tape them where there is no stamped image. I just need to move this over so I can see it a little bit better. There we go. Then these pieces of tape, you can just reuse them. This one I'm gonna tape on the bottom here. And that stays on, might not be totally dry yet. So you may get a little bit of transfer on your I'm cutting plates on your machine. It'll just clean up with isopropyl alcohol or permanent ink cleaner. Yeah, I got a little bit on there. So better to wait until it's completely dry before I die cutting it. I tend to get a patient sometimes, which is not the best thing. Right now. This one I believe goes on this one. This one on this one. Alright, I'm going to finish cutting these out and then I'll be back. Now, if you happen to have what I had before and didn't wait long enough in your ink was still a little bit wet when you die cut. Here's the way to fix it. So these dicots, dicot rate around the edges of the stamp. So this one here is one that lost some of the detail. So what I did was just rethink that one stamp. And then I'm just gonna put my die cut rate over there. Just a stamp that detail back in place. There we go. Now it's a lot darker again and you've got more detail to it. Do it for one more. In all honesty, better to be patient and wait till the ink is dry before die cutting. But we all have our moments where we're trying to get things down and get impatient. There we go. I'm going to let that dry completely. And then when I'm back, we will put our cart together. 8. Diecut Butterflies Card: Assembly: Alright, so my income, my butterflies, this is dry. We're ready to put our card together. One thing I wanted to mention first though, is you will probably get some alcohol ink on your dies from cutting them. You can clean this off with just some isopropyl alcohol or some permanent stamp cleaner, make sure that you completely wipe them off before and dry them off or whatever before using them again. So I've got my stamp positioned here where I want it to go. I like to stamp my sentiment first before gluing on the card. So if something happens to go wrong, I can just swap out the card base. And I also like to use the positioner for this so that if by chance it doesn't stamp perfectly the first time in it it did. I can re stamp it. I could just repeat that stamp and it'll be positioned in the exact same spot. And I will know that I can position it in or I can stamp in exactly the same spot. Let's move that out of the way. I'm just going to increase this a little bit better. There we go. I want this big butterfly here in the center. So before I glue them down, I'm just going to position that one there. I want that one there. I'm going to take this guy here. I'm trying to go from green to the purple or the pink. Alright, so I'm going to glue this one down and I'm only gluing the body down. This will likely move and shift a little bit as I am gluing the rest of them down because I'm not waiting for the glue to dry, but that's also okay because I want to be able to move and adjust as I'm working on them. If you wanted, you could glue them down flat. But I liked the dimension. Having the wings pop-up gives it. I am trying to stay within the edges of the card though. And I'm also trying to make sure that they're not all facing the exact same way. I'm using the distress collage medium again. Once again, I like it because it is clear and if anything seeps out or anything moves and my glue isn't in the same spot. It is going to be completely matte and you'll never know that there's glue there. There we go. So I'm going to let that completely dry. But I love the movement of the butterflies on the card. I've got my second background here, just drying, waiting for the next card. I'm just going to be using it in the same way as this, but just creating embellishments for some of the other cards. 9. Alcohol Ink Lift Refill Technique: Background: Alright, so we've already used an alcohol lift pad to create a card. Well, actually three. But you can also get thinkers for that pad. And there's a fun technique that you can use these reinforcers for with stencils. So we're going to create this one here. So the very first step is to create the background. So I'm going to spray isopropyl or my whole thing and start dripping my alcohol inks. Now, one thing that I forgot to mention in the first one with the lift pad is you'll notice I'm only using the regular alcohol inks. I'm not using any metallics or pearls for that. And the reason is the lift ink will only lift the regular alcohol inks. It will not lift the pearls. You can use those pearls and metallics and stuff like that in your alcohol ink prints and lift from those prints. However, any place where there's metallic, it will stay there. It will not lift up. So just be prepared that if you do use a metallic or a pearl or whatnot, that will not lift from your prints. It does create a fun look to it. But if you're wanting, if you're thinking it's going to lift up that it's not going to. Then you'll also notice that in all of these alcohol ink basis or whatever that we're creating, my paper keeps catching on the dryer. I'm using the same color order, but not one of these backgrounds is the same as a different one. So that's part of the beauty of alcohol inks, is you can use the exact same colors and the exact same order. You're never gonna get the same. Since it always is going to flow a little bit different. You're going to move the tool and a little bit of a different way. So it's just a fun, fun to see how they flow, to learn how they flow and then create your prints from what you've learned. I'm gonna do another layer here. I've got a good base layer. I'm trying to get the entire background covered in which I do. But I also want to build up the ink. There's a, a bigger wow factor when you've got lots of ink and then you remove some, then if you have just a thin layer and remove it, so I'm just going to do another layer here. And below that around. I also like the texture that you get from having multiple layers of ink on here. A lot of that went super thick. Let's just do one more. Then that's probably going to be good. Just want to break up somebody who's really, really thick parts. And you can go and lift from them. But it's going to take a couple tries to get a good Lift from those areas. So I'm just trying to break it up a little bit. I'm not trying to completely get rid of them just because I like seeing different darks and lights or whatever the different textures add to the effect. Alright, Those aren't moving anymore, so I'm just going to leave that to dry. So for this one, we used, we have a coordinating sentiment. And the way to do that is stamping a boss with white embossing powder. I'll show you in the next two cards how to sampling bias. If you haven't done it, then all you're going to do it has to be on black card stock because if the background of this is a different color, you're going to see these inks on the background. So it only works with black card stock and white embossing powder, but you can customize your sentiment to go with your card. So I am putting the alcohol ink on the whole thing because if you only put alcoholic just over the powder or the embossing, you kinda see a little bit of an outline. So by putting the alcohol ink on the whole thing, it'll just even itself out. This needs to be 100% dry before you use it. If there's any slightly moist alcohol in there, it is going to resist any adhesive that you're going to be using to put it on your card. So I'm going to let both of these completely dry, although I've already got my sentiment for this card done, I'm going to let this completely dry and then I'll see you start lifting. 10. Alcohol Ink Lift Refill Technique Card: Assembly: Alright, so some of these thicker areas are taking a little bit longer to completely dry. I've dabbed up some with a bit of a paper towel just so you'll see a little bit of a difference in them. I have another one that I had done earlier that I have ready to go, so I'm going to use that one for right now. So one thing I wanna do for this technique, because I want to take part of my piece down. I know this area here is where a central image will not be. Then I'm going to, I don't really want this flower. I'm trying to use more. These flowers here. I want that up a little bit. Do you see my tape in there inside the image? So I want to lift that up a little bit so that I don't have that. Alright, so now what we're gonna do is I have a distress tool with a foam debris and they're usually used for spreading out distress ink and inking images. But what I'm going to use it for is my alcohol refill or alcohol lift ink refill. Now, this I keep with my alcohol inks, so it only gets used for this. I'm just going to dab over my stencil. Now I'm not doing a circular motion, It's just up and down dabbing. And keep in mind if you put too much of the lift ink on your sponge, some of it will seep underneath your stencil. You'll see the alcohol lifting and going onto my stencil that can be cleaned up. So this is the reason why we're taping it down. So I can lift this up and I can start lifting the alcohol ink. Now, in some of those really dark areas, if it hasn't really lifted as much as I would like it to. I can put my central rate back down and do a second pass. And it will be positioned exactly how I need it to be. And I can see that I'm gonna wanna do that because it hasn't lifted up as much as I want. So let's put a little bit more. Lift ink on my surface here. And you can rub it a little bit, but just with a light hand and all that I'm doing by doing that is I'm just trying to rub some of that alcohol ink to get it to move a little bit. There's so many Jags and jogs in this stencil that I don't want to do too much. And I'm kind of going with the stencil so that I'm not picking any of it up. So this one here, I wouldn't want to go up here because I'd be picking up all those little bits there. You just have to be careful when you're doing this. And I'm also not pressing because I'm trying as much as possible to not push any of that ink below this tensile. Some of it might go below the stencil anyways, but I'm trying to not do that as much as possible. Alright, now let's lift this up and see that's much better than the first time. I'm gonna get another clean area of paper towel and dab that up. And you can see some of the ink where it went under the stencil. For this particular image, it's totally fine. And I would choose an image that if that happened, it would be It wouldn't ruin anything. But you see how with the dark background having a nice contrast, just really, it gives more of a wow factor then if the background was really light, alright, so I've lifted up as much as I can. So now I'm gonna go in with the clean area paper towel and just a light circular motion. Just get any excess ink off of there. So the stencil, I would clean off with some permanent stamp cleaner, but I will do that in a moment. Stick into my finger. Alright, let's move this piece of tape here. And then all of our pieces are ready. We can just put our occurred together. I'm going to glue my blue match down first. And then my alcohol ink piece. Sometimes the backs look really, really cool. How the ink kind of pools underneath. You get some really interesting looks. There we go. Now I've got my sentiment here. I've got my butterfly stamped, but I still have to die cut it. So let's just glue on the sentiment while we have it here. Let's move this out of the way. I want to get this off of the table before put something in it. I did put some foam pop dots on the back of the sentiment, so it pops up just a little bit. Just a simple way to add some dimension. There we go. Alright, I already have my stamps in my image. Are my butterfly stamped here? I just want to die cut it. I actually stamped a few of them because I need another one for one of the other cards. And I wanted to give it time to completely dry. I don't want this one. I actually didn't accidentally stamped that one a little bit off of the page. So I'm just going to put my tape on that. The tape, this one has the background that has that opal alcoholic. The tape seems to lift that up, so I definitely don't want to be putting my tape over top of my image and accidentally ruining that. Let's see how it lifted in some areas there. So just be aware of that where you put your tape, but don't put it over top of your image. Just in case that happens sometimes. Even though you think something's going to or you know, something's going to happen sometimes it just doesn't there's not enough pressure in that area. But just be aware of that. I'm going to my glue doesn't want to stick around because it wants to flow now, rather than actually I'll fight with it. If you ever have glue that doesn't want to come out of the nozzle, just take a thumbtack and push it in and it should start flowing again. I always have a thumbtack just sitting nearby for that particular reason. Here we go. Now, last step, even though that butterfly has got some sparkle to it, I'm just going to add a little bit of stick close to the side of the wings. No, I'm not going to put that in there. There we go. Another cute background done with lifting, but this time they re anchor and stencil. Another great way to use your stencils in a different way. 11. Alcohol Ink Pearls on Black: Background: So now we're going to have some fun with some alcohol pearls on dark card stock. Now, if I were to use just the regular alcohol inks on dark card stock, they're transparent. You're not going to see the color. So you need to use something that has some micas are some pigments with it in order for them to work properly. So these have a little metal ball in them. You need to state them up really, really well. Make sure that everything is properly. Now. You also need to use some alcohol blending solution because of the resins, the micas, whatever. You can't use isopropyl, it reacts funny with the alcohol pearls. So you have to use some blending solution. Now, one way to get these to show up on dirt card stock is to say use the snow white mix it IV or using a metallic with it so that the color will show up on top of those. But by themselves, you can see that there's a spot there, but unless you knew that was pink, you would have no idea. So let's put some lender solution here. Then the pearls. I chose pearls that were very similar in color to the rest of the colors we're using in this class. So make them look similar to the other cards. And we blow them around in a fairly similar fashion because of the micas and then they don't move quite the same. You can use these pearls on just the regular glossy card stock or the Yuko. They will work absolutely perfect on that. Well, so you don't need to just use dark card stock. Let's put a few more. You build up the colors a little bit. You could turn that off while I'm doing this. Even like these, I even like them just like that. I think it looks really, really cool. So I'm not adding more of the blending solution just because I liked the way that it looks. But if you wanted it to flow a little bit more, you could add some more. Put a few drops of the pink up at the top just to get a little bit more continuity with rest of it. I'm just going to let that dry. Like that. I'm going to leave some of the block on the sides here. Actually, I think I'm going to blend a little bit more out just down here. So it's not just a big line of block on the side there. I like having some of the background showing. But I don't want to have a whole bunch of it. Alright, So that I like that, I'm going to let that dry and then I'll see you in a moment and we will do some stamping in a bar, right? Or alcohol ink is dry and we're ready to stamp in a boss. So we're not going to use the same tool that we've been blowing around. Embossing powder to emboss. And I use a heat gun, a heat gun, it is going to emit heat to melt that powder. Very first thing we need to do is we're going to stamp or image. I am stamping with, or I'm using versa mark ink. Just stamp. That is a sticky, clear ink that is going to let the embossing powder stick to it. So same as stamping before I hold in one spot and I press around to make sure I got good contact with the paper. Then I'm going to pour the powder over top. There's any parts of that alcohol link that wasn't dry. This powder will stick to it, which is why you need to make sure that it's absolutely dry before you continue. Then we're going to heat it with a heat gun. So I'm going to move it slowly around with the heat gun. This is completely cool. I haven't used it yet today, so it's going to take a bit for it to warm up, but you'll see it go from granular Matt, too shiny and smooth. There you go. And always pointing us away from your hands. It does get quite hot, so we don't want to burn herself. So I'm just going to let that cool and I will see you in a moment and we'll put her car together. 12. Alcohol Ink Pearls on Black: Card Assembly: Alright, or alcohol ink is dry and we're ready to stamp and a boss. So we're not going to use the same tool that we've been blowing around, embossing powder to emboss. And I use a heat gun, a heat gun, it is going to emit heat to melt that powder. Very first thing we need to do is we're going to stamp or image. I am stamping with, or I'm using versa mark ink stamp. So that is a sticky, clear ink that is going to let the embossing powder stick to it. So same as stamping before I hold in one spot and I press around to make sure I got good contact with the paper. Then I'm going to pour the powder over top. There's any parts of that alcohol link that wasn't dry. This powder will stick to it, which is why you need to make sure that it's absolutely dry before you continue. And then we're going to heat it with a heat gun. So I'm going to move it slowly around with the heat gun. This is completely cool. I haven't used it yet today, so it's going to take a bit for it to warm up, but you'll see it go from granular Matt, too shiny and smooth. There you go. And always pointless away from your hands. It does get quite hot, so we don't want to burn ourselves. So I'm just going to let that cool and I will see you in a moment and we'll put her car together. Alright, I have all my pieces here ready to go. So let's just grab the glue. Remember all of these measurements will be on the supply list. This one I did a double mat to bring out the colors in the car stock. The other reason I did that is because the black alcohol ink cards.com is in pieces that are five by seven. Cards that I'm making are four and a quarter by 5.5. To cut a five by seven down. I'd cut one in half. So then it's 3.5 by five. It just makes it so I can get two cards. I would have one piece of alcohol ink card stock rather than having a bunch of black waste. Alright. Just have to hold this down for a moment until let it stick. Probably actually more than a moment, but I'm just gonna do a moment here. So when you heat with a heat gun, you will find that your card stock does tend to work a little bit. I'm going to get an acrylic block and I'm going to let it sit with that on it to hold it down. And then we'll put the rest of the car together. Alright, so I glue has dried and you can see that weighing it down. Well, it dried, made it go completely flat, which is exactly what we were wanting. I already have my adhesive on my sentiment here, so let's just take the backing off. All right, go. The last step. We're going to put a butterfly on there. So this is die cut from the glitter card stock that we colored for the second card. You could leave it like that if you wanted to. It's just a lot of whitespace, so I just thought this would help break it up. It would also give the card a little bit of extra dimension. No extra sparkle. It plays off nicely with the pearls. And then last step, I'm just going to put some glossy accents on the body. Again, just just add another different texture to the cart so that one is white or white wet. Once it dries, it'll be more like that. So it'll go it goes down a little bit as it dries. But again, it just adds another little texture there. So I'll see you in the next video and we'll do our last card, which is alcohol inks on acetate. 13. Alcohol Ink on Acetate: Image Piece: Our last card here is alcohol inks on acetate. And in order to be able to see the beauty of the acetate and be able to see how it's transparent. We're going to, when we do our assembly for our card, we're going to create a window in our cards so that you can see both the front and the back. Now this is heat resistant acetate because I am going to do some stamping and embossing. And you do need specific acetate if you want to do that. If you didn't want to emboss, if say you wanted to say stamp with some black permanent ink or whatever and just let it dry, then any acetate will, will do. You don't need the heat resistant for the alcohol inks, It's just for the embossing. I'm also going to use the opal Kenyatta alcohol ink as well with it, just to give it a little bit of sparkle, Let's put on some isopropyl. So I've got it on top of a piece of white paper just so that you can see in those blue marks are sitting on the paper, but it's not going to affect the alcohol exit. All this piece is bigger than I actually need is a quarter sheet. But this way, once it's done, I can pick which part of it I want to use and then cut it down. So the process of working on the alcohol inks exactly the same or three, acetate is exactly the same way as any of the other non porous surfaces. I put on some of the isopropyl, drop the colors and then a little bit of the opal, then more isopropyl. And let's spread that around. I don't need this to be super dark, so I'm just gonna do one layer. If by chance there's an area that gets missed, I could add a second layer. But really this is more just to get the color behind the part that I'm going to emboss. If any of that alcohol and goes on the paper, that's totally fine. It's not going to do anything, it's just going to absorb. Alright, that's stopped moving. So I'm just going to let that dry on its own for a few minutes to clean up or move my alcohol eggs out of the way so they're not gonna be in my way for when I do the stamping and embossing. So this is heat resistant. Acetate is not heat proof. So when I'm doing my embossing, once again, I'm going to use my heat gun that emits heat, not just error. And I'm going to move it around quite a bit because I don't want to concentrate the heat in one area. I'm just going to get ready for that while this is completely drying and I'll see you. Alright, so the alcohol ink is totally dry. I ended up having a little bit of a pool there that I mopped up in one there. But I'm just going to be doing my concentrating, my stamping and embossing in this area here. I'm going to use the same embossing ink that I used for the previous card. It's just a watermark sticky ink. Hold it in one spot, press around to get a nice, good clear stamped image. And I am doing the stamping and embossing the opposite side of the alcohol ink. That way I don't have to worry about any of that ink still being a little bit tacky and sticking to the powder. Alright, so like I said, when I do the embossing, I'm going to be moving my heat gun around. If I concentrate it too much, even though this is heat resistant, it will start to work. So I'm trying to move it around to disperse the heat evenly. There we go. So you can see it did warp, It's slight little bit, but that's nothing compared to how other types of acetate would react with the heat gun, with the embossing. I'll see you in the next class or next video, and we will put our car together. 14. Alcohol Ink on Acetate: Card Assembly: The first step when we're going to be putting our car together is to cut out that window. And the easiest way to make sure that that window is in the same spot for both layers. Plus we get an even matt around our window is to just tape it down temporarily in the center. Now if you're wanting to use these pieces that you cut out for other projects, make sure it's temporary adhesive. If you don't care about it, then you can use permanent adhesive. And now we're going to put our dy where we want it to go. I'm leaving a wider edge at the bottom here so that I can put my sentiment down there. I'm just going to get a little bit of dye tape and hold it in place. And that way I can make sure that it's not going to move around. When I'm putting it through my die cutting machine. I'm going to flip that up. I always die cut with the blade site up. And the reason is when I first got my machine, that's how the instructions said to do it. One time I was teaching a class and it was my dye was used the opposite way. And I figured I just let it go. And by the end of the class might die. It was curved because all the pressure comes from the top. And by having this part of the die down, I never have a curve in my dice. So if you ever having an issue with curved dies after you're using them, try flipping them the other way. And in order to do that, often you do have to tape them in place. But I'd rather get more use out of my dice, then have them start to curve those pieces of tape I will reuse over and over again. My diet can come out of there. This shape, this rectangle shape is quite simple so you can probably cut both the mat and your card piece at the same time. This can be taught to the site to be used for a future project. Now before we put anything together, I'm going to stamp it and boss at my sentiment. That way it ties into the image piece on the card. I'm just going to use my magnets to hold that in place. Place my sentiment exactly where you want. Make sure your stamps are clean when you're doing this. So you're not accidentally putting down ink on there while you're trying to place it in your stamp. This embossing ink tends to be shiny on card stock, so you can see exactly where it has gone. To see if you've gotten a clear impression. Grab a piece of paper. If you get something like that, you can use a brush to brush it off or if it's far enough away from your sentiment, you can use your fingers like I just did. But you do want to take it off before you melt it. If you melt it first, that part is going to melt to your paper and you never got to get it off. There we go. Now what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna put tape on the inside of my frame here. I'm just using a nice double-sided tape and I am going to go around all four edges to make sure it has a good seal. Take the backing off of that tape, and then center our frame with her stamped image. There we go, press it down. Now we can cut the excess off. And it doesn't need to be cut pretty all of this is going to be behind the blue mat and, or between the blue mat and the card. So you just want to make sure that it's not going past the edge of your blue. Alright, now let's put some adhesives. Are blue piece here to get this onto the front of the card. Now, this double-sided tape sticks super, super weld. If it's his stuck to your surface, the only way to get it off is using undo or basically ripping things off. So in order to get it on a little bit easier and not have to worry about trying to get it off of the whole thing. I'm just taking the ends of my tape, folding them over so they're passed the blue part. One back. Now I'm going to match my window with my window on my card base. Once it's all mashed, I can put it down and now I can take that adhesive off. Just by pulling the tail. There we go. Now it's perfect if you were to take that adhesive backing off and try to get it all down, chances or something would stick that you didn't want it wants to stick and you wouldn't be able to get it up. So I've already got my butterfly stamped and cut out. This is the one from the piece, the extra piece that we did with the opal alcohol ink. So it's got a little bit of shimmer to it. My sample card, I did one that was pinky purple, this one I did that one that was got the greens to it just so you see the difference. Neither one is right or wrong. It's all personal preference. And the last step, I'm just going to put a little bit of sticky notes around the edges again just to add a little bit of shimmer. That butterfly is still moving because that adhesive on my card is not dry yet, but once it's dry, it won't move. There we go and we'll let that dry completely. But there you go. That's how you do alcohol inks on acetate. 15. Alcohol Ink Techniques for Cardmaking Class Thank You: Thank you so much for joining me for alcohol ink techniques for card making. I hope you enjoyed learning the different techniques that were taught in this class and that's inspired you for your future projects. Just remember, any of those colors can be changed to whatever colors suit your taste, as well as any of the stamps are dicots. Again. Change them up. Have fun, get creative. We'll see you in the classroom.