Alcohol Inks: The Basics for Creating Wispy Abstracts

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] I love using things that are a bit more unpredictable in my art. Things that serendipitously give you something amazing without you being able to control every element that you use to create. I'm Denise Love and I'm an artist and photographer. Today we're going to play with the ultimate uncontrollable art supply, and that's alcohol ink. So I want to show you how I work with a product that really is hard to control, doesn't go where you want it to go, and let's see what beautiful abstracts that we can create with this very flowy ink. I like working with lots of different inks because the acrylic ink stays within the water and the watercolor stays within the water. The alcohol just spreads and spreads and spreads. So in today's class, I'm going to show you my favorite ways to temper where that alcohol's going. We're not going to have full control over it, but I'm going to show you how I have a little more control and the way that I like to manipulate that ink. We'll do several projects. We'll start off small and create some fun small little abstracts. We'll swatch out all our colors, which I find is really the best way to play with the different air blowing items that you choose to try to experiment with. Because if you sample all your colors, now you have however many colors that you have, I probably have at least 50. That gave me 50 chances to play with my air blowing devices before I moved to a piece of art. So really loves watching things out first then making some small color samplers based on the colors that I loved from my swatches. Because I guarantee you cannot tell what color that ink is going to be just in the bottle. Then we're going to move on to some larger pieces and get some movement and see how all the stuff that we tried in our smaller pieces translates into going larger. The secret there is to just not get in a hurry. Take your time. Go with the flow and just see what you get. I can't wait to see what projects you create today in class. Be sure to come back and share some of those with me. So let's get started. [MUSIC] 2. Class Project: [MUSIC] Your class project today is to come back and share any of the abstracts that you created in class. I'd love to see any of the smaller sampler ones that you did as you were experimenting, and playing with color, and air blowing, and possibly any mark-making that you decided to add to your piece. Then I'd love to see how you translated that into a larger piece. I can't wait to see the projects that you make in class. Come back and share those. Let's get started. [MUSIC] 3. Supplies: Let's take a look at our supplies in class today. You're going to need to have first and foremost, some type of alcohol ink, and I have a couple of different choices. I have the Tim Holtz Ranger brand, which are the Adirondacks alcohol ink colors, and those are fun. There's lots of those colors, I've got a little too tubs of just lots of different colors I collected over the years. I also have some Copic Various Ink colors. I actually loved the Copic ones because they come in like over 300 colors in lots of different variations, and there's a whole lot of ink in here that just goes on forever. What these are, you get these at the art store and they are refill inks for the Copic markers, so if you've got these alcohol ink markers, this is the refills for these markers. But you don't have time with any of the markers just get the inks. But the colors are beautiful, there's a big variety, and these are the ones that I really love the color range of so any alcohol ink, that's fine. If you've got these arrangers, they work great too. There's several colors in here that I really love also. In addition to the regular inks, we also are going to have some fun with some metallics and there's a couple of different ones of those that I really love. I love this Jacquard Pinata, the gold and then I love some of this Tim Holtz Mixatives and the gold on the Pinata is my favorite, the silver I didn't really like the way it works as well. It doesn't quite do the same, so if you only get one, get this gold by the Pinata and these ranger ones come in gold, and silver, and there's a pearl. The pearl is not my favorite either. There are a couple of choices there, I do like the silver by Tim Holtz better personally. If you want a silver, that's the one I like. I like having both of the golds because they're different. They're completely different in the way they look and react and so they're just fun to experiment with. I do like having some of those. You also want a bottle of some isopropyl alcohol and this is what we're going to use to spread the ink around with. I get the 91 percent, you can get 91-99, you don't want anything any lower than the 91 because it's just got more additives of water. I believe it's got more additives in it. You want it to be almost pure alcohol if you can, so 91 percent isopropyl is what I will be using and I just got that at the grocery store. Then, I also put some of that alcohol into some little containers. I have this little container that still got some alcohol at the bottom, it's got a nice tip on it. I also like these fine-line applicators. They're my favorite. They do give you more control over your alcohol and we take this lid off here and you can see I've got this nice pointer tip on it. You get a lot more control, the finer that tip is, so that's my favorite. I've got a couple of these and I just take a little funnel and funnel some alcohol out of my bigger alcohol bottle onto that and then use this all through class, so you'll be seeing me use this the whole time. These are fine-line applicators, I just got a pack of these off Amazon. I love those. You'll also need some paper. Normally, you see everybody do alcohol inks on YUPO and I've done alcohol inks on YUPO and you close a little bit pricey. You feel like you can't practice as much because you're just using all the expensive paper basically. I've got on a really cool solution to this problem now. This is what's most common if you have YUPO, feel free to use it, but it stains so you put the ink on it and you get color staining and you can't get rid of that staining. I'm going to do an example for us so that we can see some differences. I also recently started using mineral paper, which is a lot cheaper than the YUPO. I could get this for YUPO, just to give you an example, these 9 by 12, 10 sheets, that's about $15 a pad. I think if I'm remembering that correct. I had this multimedia paper, it's 20 sheets, so double the amount that's in the YUPO, and it was only $7 and $11 apart. It's already more than half the price of the YUPO. It's a lot thinner than the YUPO. That's depends on how thick you want that paper, could be a plus or minus, but it also stains, YUPO is basically plastic. Mineral paper is made from crushed rocks, so that was a fun little thing to experiment with was something that wasn't made of plastic or trees. I do love mineral paper for alcohol inks, but again, it stains and it just is another option for us to use. But my new favorite for alcohol inks is the NARA paper in N-A-R-A. This paper is basically plastic also, it's white. It's probably polypropylene, so it's a plastic. But what's so amazing about it is it does not stain and when we do our paper demonstration, you're going to see what big of a deal that makes. Now you can buy one pack of paper, which these run about $14 for 10 sheets. But Amazon has a random deal, like it's a buy one get one free so you might look at the fine print under the pricing and see, I just placed several orders for buy one get one free. But these are 9 by 12 pieces of paper and what's really nice about it is they don't stain. If you get like this 9 by 12 pack and you cut it into quarters, you can start practicing on the smaller paper and get really good, and for every one that you don't like, you can just wipe it off and try again so there is no waste. That is the magic of the NARA paper. It has no waste. I can wipe it off and try again 100 times if I need to. Now, instead of wasting a piece of paper for everything that I create and think, oh, I don't like that and throw it away or put it to the side, now, I can just wipe it back off this paper and try again. It's magic, and so it does not stain, that no staining allows us to get really pretty wispy looks in an alcohol. It allows us to wipe off things we don't like. We can wipe off any dots that appear that were a mistake. It's the most forgiving paper. For the price, since I can reuse it over and over and over, then I can end up with everything that I love. I can just keep the ones I love and wipe off what I don't love, there's virtually no waste. NARA paper, that's my favorite. We also maybe going to draw on top of some of our pieces. These are just play pieces I've done before, but I like riding on top of them and doing some more mark-making or some dots or some fun stuff. You can only do that with water-based products on top of alcohol. If you put anything alcohol-based on top alcohol, like if I came back with my Copic marker and decided to draw on this, the alcohol reactivates the alcohol and it would ruin your piece. Anything water-based, like acrylic paint, anything like that, you can draw right on top of that and you have no problems. I love using the Posca Pens. They're really beautiful on top of this. Also like using my very favorite Kuretake Mica, ink and paste. So those are beautiful on top of these. Anything water-based, if you like to stamp beautiful designs on top of your artwork, you could do that with water-based stamp pads and stamps. The pigment based ones are also water-based. Usually, this color box collection seems to be my favorite, but you can experiment with different brands and see what you like and just play. This might be something you're interested in if you like stamping things in your artwork, I just thought I would mention that. I also like to make my own color cards. I've made a color samples on that mineral paper because it was the least expensive of the three types of paper that I use. But still looks like what the alcohol ink is going to look like on one of my papers, and I cut it into two-inch by three-inch or so PSI squares. I tried lots of different ink pens that I have, but I really liked the Pigma Micron ink pens to write on. I just wrote my colors and what I did in this pen because it doesn't smear with the alcohol ink, so that's my favorite black pen. It comes in a couple of colors. You also want like a couple of little brushes that you can maybe move the ink around in, so I've just pulled a couple out of my brush stash. Not really specific, I just pulled out a few that I thought, just in case I want a brush, I got a couple to play with. You also want to have something to push the ink around. So I have a couple of different options. You can get a straw and you can blow the ink around through the straw. If you're doing that, practice a little bit to see how that's going to work for you and see how fast you run out of breath. I get lightheaded using a straw, so I don't use a straw myself, but this is just a regular drinking straw, something you can blow the ink around with. I use a little airbrush and many compressor set. These run me about $7 or so for this little master airbrush kit. It comes with little airbrush, and it comes with a little mini air compressor. This is really nice because then you can just move the air around. You're not wanting any tips on it or anything, you just want to be able to move air around. This is what I've used for a long time. Then I saw people using a blow dryer that looks like this, and I thought, "What is that thing they're using?" They say don't use heat on the inks. But if you use something like this on the cool setting, the cool is not really cooling air. It's very low heat and that makes your ink dry faster. It's a lot easier to use this and get that ink to dry and keep going. This is what that is. It's a curl wand, and I didn't realize that these little tips don't come on the base. So that's what this is. I'm using a Revlon curl wand. This is the one-inch size, it's about a 500 watt. I'll show you how we'll use that. But I love it because I've got more control than using like a little hairdryer. You can use a hairdryer on your cool setting, but this is the one that you'll see in lots of really good alcohol ink artist using a lot of times. So super cool. I love that little gadget. Now we have gone through most of the supplies. You'll also maybe be thinking about the blending solution from the Tim Holtz. Let me tell you, this works for me on the YUPO in the mineral paper to make the alcohol land on the paper really nicely without leaving like a drop stain. But when we're using this NARA paper, because there's no staining anyway, you could choose not to use this and just use the isopropyl alcohol as your thing to move the ink around and it works great. This is optional if you're using that NARA paper. If you're using the YUPO or the mineral paper, then I did actually like using this quite a bit. So optional item that alcohol blending solution by Tim Holtz. I think that's most of what we'll be using in class, so let's get started. 4. Safety: [MUSIC] Let's talk about safety when you're doing the alcohol inks for a moment. Alcohol is got a very strong fume to it. You may think that the alcohol bothers you or doesn't bother you and you'll just have to see as you're using it, how much it bothers you, but no matter what you think it's doing, it's probably doing more than you think it's doing, so I recommend you just always follow like a basic safety protocol when using the inks. You want to have some airflow in the room or you want to work outside or in an open area, like maybe go in the garage and open the door so you have lots of fresh air. Because if you're working in a room like my studio, the air just builds up and get stale. The alcohol, the fumes are just right here and they are just lingering. That's what you don't want, you want to keep some good air movements. In my studio, I have a fan in the window that pulls the air out. I have a fan attached to my desk that pushes the air towards that window, so I have a constant air flow as I'm using ink. That's number 1. Number 2, when you're doing stuff to blow this around if you're using a straw, this is like just a regular drinking straw. You could just take this out of the soul paper wrapper. When you're blowing your piece, you want to blow air down, but you don't want to suck air back up because the air coming back up, is that alcohol fume. You want to blow air down, move your straw away from your piece, suck air back in, come back and blow air back down. Don't ever just be hovering around it and just be blowing in and out and in and out and in and out. You're sucking that alcohol fume into your lungs, and you don't want do that. Be mindful of that if you're using a straw. Another thing I want to mention, and it's the biggest red flag indicator for me, so that I know what it's doing, is if I'm breathing the alcohol in and I don't have enough air ventilation, after working with it for 30 minutes to an hour, you'll start to get a headache. If you're ever working with the inks and you're getting a headache, it's affecting you and you didn't even know it. You don't have enough ventilation, and you'll need to make some adjustments to your workflow. If you work with it and you're getting a headache. I want you to be mindful of that, if you start getting the twinges of a headache and you think, I think I'm getting a headache. It's the fumes from the alcohol creating that, and I want you to up your airflow or take a break and walk away and then move your space to somewhere with more ventilation. A headache is a number 1 red flag to me. Another thing is gloves. I don't wear gloves often enough, but I want you to wear gloves because we're going to use the gloves to maybe move around alcohol. We don't want a bunch of alcohol sitting on our skin, soaking into our skin. A pair of gloves, especially the hand that is maybe the dominant hand working with the alcohol. Whatever hand that is, at least wear the one glove but I'd prefer if you wore both gloves. You're not supposed to put heat on alcohol because alcohol is flammable, but if you use a hairdryer or one of these straight dryers that came with the curl piece on the end, looks like this here, that's what this is, then use it on the cool setting only. The cool setting is not cold air, it's slightly warm air, but you'll like that slight warmth because it'll dry your inks faster. On a low setting only, do not use a high setting on a blower like this. Keep these things in mind, just a little bit of safety will go a long way and I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC] 5. Color Swatches: In this video, let's talk about making swatches of all your colors, and I'll apologize at the very beginning of this, you will hear my fans going. I also have my gloves on. I want you to remember safety first. If you hear the fans going and you're thinking it's annoying, it's a reminder to you that you need to think of safety first when you're using anything that has a fume to it like the alcohol inks. So I apologize, the fans will be going. I want you to create some smaller pieces, get your paper that you want to create your samples on, and cut it up into little samples. About two-inch by three-inch is what I'm using today, and I want you to make a color swatch of all your colors. The reason I want you to do this is because then you can see what the color looks like, how it spreads on the paper. If it separates out into more than one color. I also did a set of these with the gold and the silver and got to see how that looked. So I want you to do a set of metallics. So a set of all your solid colors and a set of metallics, and then this is how we can pick colors to do. Then I can say, oh, I want to do something in Meadow, what color can go with all, will look at this purple eggplant. Here's the colors I want to use and oh, let's look at this. I love this Jacquard gold, so maybe we can go with that gold. So you can see how easy that's going to make looking for your colors. This is really important too because say like this is bronze, and if I'm looking at bronze and ice-ocean, and I didn't have listed what color I used. I might pick that ice-ocean and then start working with it and think, wait a minute, that does not look like my sample. I want you to make a sample of every color and label at the bottom of that sample what color that was and the other benefit to doing that, now you get a chance to work with your air-blowing tools here. I had some blanks right here. Let's get these blanks. Now, you get a chance to experiment with the air blowing tools like your dryer. These are stuck together. So we can experiment with our dryer, we can experiment with our blower. Let's just go for it. I think that's two pieces of paper but I got my gloves on, so I can't feel. Let's just pick a color. Let's say I want to do pea green, and I can even say maybe with some gold and pick which gold that would be. So now I want to go ahead, shake your ink up before you open it. Pick your gold, shake your gold up before you open it. You want to shake the gold really, really well, and maybe I want some alcohol available, so have the alcohol open and ready. Now, it's the time that we want to just experiment here. So maybe I'll do say a drop or two of the pea green, maybe a tiny bit of that gold. Now let's just do a little bit of alcohol on here, and see what it does. So I like to have a piece of cardboards and now I can pick these up and look at it. I can move this around. Now, I can test out my different supplies, so I can test out little drier That was on the cool. I can also test out my little air gun and see how that works. With the drier, what I like about it's going to dry the ink faster for me. There we go, and that's basically dry. Now what I like about doing the drier, is it dried a whole lot faster than anything else I've ever tried. Now I can see the different layers of this color from the darkest to lightest. I can get a feel for how my air blower is going to work. I can do all these samples that I've already done. Now, I get a feel for how to work that drier on 50 different pieces rather than starting right in on my piece of artwork. These pieces I made with my air gun, this piece I made with the dryer, look at how amazing that looks on with the dryer. It's super cool. I like the control and the way it's a little wispier than I was getting with my blower. Super cool. I love the difference there. This is actually like a color that's similar. Look how different that looks on there. So this is a perfect example of test out each of your blowers. This is the air gun and this is the dryer and say, oh which look do we like better? This is really appealing to me. I love that. So I want you to make samples of every color that you have, and a color with some gold and I picked it the same color to do the gold and the silver and all the different things with so that I could see how that affected the color that I chose. Here's another one. That's a pea green with the gold, and so I just marked, what color did I use and wrote it down. So I want you to do a sample of all your pieces. Perfect time to experiment with your blowing apparatuses, even if it's just a straw. Then, that's where we're going to get started. So make your samples and I'll see you back in class. 6. Paper Test: Nara vs Mineral & Yupo: Let's do a paper comparison. I'll apologize again, you'll hear my fans going because I'm going to be using the inks. I'll put some gloves back on, always safety first. I want to look at the different ways that these three papers work. I have cut down a piece of Yupo, a piece of mineral paper, and a piece of the Nara, and then we're going to take a look at how they work with the ink and then how easily can I mop up a mistake, can I change something. I've got some shop towels. I like using a lint-free towel with my alcohol and that's what I've got. I'm going to start off by putting a little bit of ink on each one of these, and spreading it around, and letting it dry, and just seeing what does this look like on here. Then let's see if we can clean up any mistakes or wipe off the ink when we're done. I'm just going to put a couple of drops. I'm going to move this with some alcohol. This is another fun feature of using the heat. Look how cool that is. This is only Yupo, it's my first sample. Look at what that does. It makes beautiful rings and some separation of color and some staining like you can see right up here. There is some blue staining like an undertone of that color. Very interesting. Now I can see how that copic various ink pea green looks on Yupo. Let's do the same thing on the mineral paper and the Nara and then we'll talk about it. So just a couple of drops of ink, a little bit of alcohol. You'll notice I'm not using anything else with it right now. I just want to see what this does. Now we've got some ink on the Nara. Now on the Nara, it's very interesting, I don't see any outlays of staining like I saw with the Yupo. Very interesting there in how the ink actually stayed quite a bit cleaner and a little crisper looking than it does on the Yupo. On the mineral paper also, don't see as much staining like outlying outside of the piece like I did with the Yupo. The Yupo is definitely staining the most. The mineral paper stained a little bit less. The Nara paper is a no-stain paper, so all of that pigment is staying within the ink itself, it's not staining the paper underneath. That's very interesting. Now, look at this cool little thing. Now, I'm just going to take a little bit of alcohol on a shop towel or I could just put the alcohol really right across here. This reactivates our ink if I put the alcohol across it. Let's say I just want to wipe that off. On the Yupo, if I wipe that off, you can still see all that ink that stained the paper., so there's really no way to 100 percent correct a mistake. With the mineral paper, I'm just going to put some alcohol on there, and again, wipe that off. Again, you'll see we have paper stain, so there's really no way to 100 percent correct a mistake or get a dot off that randomly landed somewhere you didn't want it. This is the magic of this paper right here, people. Nara paper, a little bit of alcohol. Look at that. I wiped that write-off. No staining at all. It's magic. Let's just say that I wanted to reuse this piece of paper now for something else. I could just wipe it with some alcohol and a clean towel and I could just completely erase everything that I did and do it again. Now you have no waste. With the mineral paper and the Yupo paper, I felt like with every design that I did, if I didn't like it or it didn't work out or there was a mistake on there, I just had to throw that piece of paper away. But with the Nara paper, I can have one piece of paper and I could practice 10,000 times. Just wiping it clear like an eraser board. Just clean it right off, no staining. Let that alcohol dry for a minute and you're ready to do another piece. This paper, even though it's priced wise in the middle of the two other papers, this paper really is the cheapest paper because there's no waste. You just wipe it off and keep going. How cool is that? I thought that would be a really fun demo to show you what you could do on the Yupo mineral and Nara paper and if you could fix mistakes and what paper is obviously my favorite. I hope you enjoyed seeing that comparison and I'll see you back in class. 7. Cleaning Off Nara Paper: Let's do a quick demo on cleaning off the NARA paper. We just did a demo. If you already saw it, then we're just going to be duplicating that demo. But just in case you skipped that, I want you to still know how to do this. I'm going to show you how we clean up stuff. Let's say you make a piece and you're like, oh, there's some dots up here. I don't want the dots up there. That looks like a mistake. I need to wipe that mistake off. You can either put a little bit of alcohol onto your paper and just wipe it off, super cool. Or you can put a little bit of alcohol onto your rag or towel or whatever it is you're using and wipe that way. I do find it a little bit easier if you put it on the paper and wipe the paper, it's a little more controllable. But look how easy that is to just say clean up a mistake or an edge or take off some on your drawing. Let's say you just hate it completely, then you want to clean the whole paper off. You don't have to throw it away. This paper is super cool. Just spread some alcohol, just the regular alcohol on your piece. Wipe it if you see any residual ink, just do it again. New clean sides so you're not just wiping in back on it. Just wipe everything off just like it was a clean slate. Now, just let that alcohol dry for a moment because it does have wet alcohol on the paper, or set it to the side and use a different piece and have a couple of pieces that you're working and erasing and practicing on and then you're ready to use it again. How amazing is that? I love this NARA paper because it does not stain and it lets you fix mistakes. I'll see you back in class. 8. Air Blowing Options: [MUSIC] I'm working on the NARA paper and I want to look at the three different ways to push around ink that I'm looking at here. You can also get one of those things that looks like a balloon with a little spout and it has a little hand air blower, you could get one of those. I don't have one of those. I'm going to be blowing air with a straw, with a hairdryer, and with an air gun. I've got three options to use and we might just put a little bit of ink on here just to see what those differences look like and maybe a little bit of alcohol. When you're blowing air on it, blow air, lean back or lean away to suck air in and then come back and blow air. Don't blow air and suck air as it's remaining over your piece. [NOISE] Again, move it to suck some area in because if you suck the air in, you're sucking all those fumes in. There we go, so that's blowing with a straw. That was pretty easy. There wasn't anything hard about that. But let me tell you, you'll get lightheaded really quick blowing it with a straw. Let's do a little thing of ink and try the air gun. Now, what I like about the air gun, this has got this little bit of air compressor which I'm going to set in the floor so we don't have to hear it turn on on top of the fans going, but I want you to remember safety, so fans, fans, fans [LAUGHTER]. Like about this is you can push down to get the air to blow and you can control how much you push down, so you have a little control over how much airflow comes out and I'm working it to the side or right on top round. Just being real careful to start the air off my piece rather than right on my piece because if I start it right on my piece, I'm going to make a mess. Let's just take a look at that. Let's just do that. Let's do one where we just make a mess. Now I'm right on it. Look what I did, all over the place, no control. Now, let's do that right over here. A little bit of ink and now if I started off to the side, I can very gently come around and start to control it a lot easier. I can direct the air flow with the direction that I go. But I don't want to start right directly on top of the piece. I want to come around a little bit softer with what I'm doing. Because it's just blowing cold air it's going to take longer to dry than using our little hairdryer. But it's interesting to see how can I move things around, what does it look like with this particular tool? Is that the look I'm wanting, I'm going for? Then we can let it do its thing. This was air gun. That actually looks pretty cool, now that's done that so if you want that, that's how to do that [LAUGHTER]. Let's use the dryer, so with the dryer, whether you use a regular hairdryer that's L-shaped or you get one of these and leave the top hair apparatus piece off of it so that you have this thing to work with, you don't want to go directly on the ink, just like with the air gun going directly on it gives you no control. Let's just try that. Let's just do it right here [LAUGHTER]. If you try it once, then you know, I feel like it [NOISE], see there, no control. It just went everywhere no matter what I did when I was straight on top of it. In general, that's not what we want. We want full control. Maybe I want a drop here, maybe a little bit of alcohol, we'll let that spread a tiny bit, so maybe I'll just spread it a tiny bit and I want to come in straight up and work my way around straight up but never straight on it, so coming towards it [NOISE]. You saw how I was doing that. I was coming up to it but not right on top of it for most of that and I was going around and directing that ink flow that gave me the most control of that piece. There we go, different samples. Out of that, the straw is easy, but it's going to make you run out of breath and go lightheaded very quickly. Air gun, it's got its place, it's a favorite tool of mine. There's a lot of control there. It takes a little longer for the ink to dry, but there's lots of great applications for that. Then the air dryer, the ink dries the fastest and we have control over it if we come in from the side and not directly on top of it. Now that dried, it's actually cool too [LAUGHTER]. Even though I'm like don't do this, there is a place for this. Look at each of the options and see what is going to work for your piece of abstract as you're going. I thought that was a pretty cool demo and looking at how different blow things work and if you've got more than one option to blow air around, I want you to test them and then keep your little test sheets so you can be like, "Oh, that was the dryer, cool. Oh, that was the air blower. Let's go with that." I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC] 9. Single Color Abstracts: In this video, let's do a one-color little abstract. I'm looking through my samples because I've made a sample of everything and look at this copper. This is Copic Copper E18. Look at how gorgeous that color is. It'd be really beautiful mixed with this borons, look how pretty that is. I'm going to use copper. I'm going to do a one color little abstract to just play and manipulate the ink and get used to how I work with the ink. That's the color we're going to be playing with first on mine. What I want to do is I'm going to put some ink down, I'm going to put some alcohol down I'm going to let that dry a bit. Then to make some wispy pretty variances, I'm going to put some more ink down and some more alcohol and start reactivating and moving stuff around until I get something I love. If I don't love it, remember, we can just put alcohol on it and just wipe it all back off. You don't want to use too much ink. It doesn't have to be like a giant puddle of ink. We just want like a little bit of ink. I want you to try some different shapes to see as we're creating, does the shape make a difference? Is it going to give us some variations on our abstract? I'm just going to start off moving that ink around. Then we're going to let that do a little bit of drying. Then we'll just see, what we can get, so we'll start with this. I'm going to go ahead and play with my hairdryer. You saw it was coming in at it, but not directly on top of it. Just to get started and look at how much color variation that we have just in that right there. If I want to get some wispy areas and maybe bring it in a little differently. I'm like what I got here. I can put some more ink and some more alcohol and then start blowing those and making them wispy. Just putting the alcohol on it isn't going to give you what you want. Because what that does on any area where we have a really thick amount of alcohol, if I just add alcohol to that, it leaves a seam there that's not so pretty. Let me just show you that and we'll see what we get. Even though alcohol reactivates alcohol, and actually it did a pretty good job there, but I can still see the underlying line of what I had there. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. The longer you work it, the more it has a time to work the rest of that ink into this ink. But for the most part, it works better if you just activate it with some ink. You can even take your finger, move that around where you want it. Have a cloth ready to wipe your finger off so it's a little more controlled. Then wipe the alcohol one side. Now we can come back. You see how we got that to just push and pull. We got some interesting lines in it. The more you push it and pull it, the more lines you can make in the piece. If you don't like all the lines, maybe push and don't push, pull, push, pull, push, pull that's how you get that. Whereas here we have less lines, it's a little smoother so very interesting there, seeing the differences in the way that you blow that ink. Now we can do the same with the air guns, so we might just do another little corner here, a little bit of ink, a little bit alcohol. We can tap that with our finger to really put that where we want it. Again, don't start the air right there on the piece start beside it and work your way over to it. We can work it down and then we can start seeing that wisp Venus appear as we're doing that. We can stop and just let the ink sit and do its thing once it's everywhere that it wants to be. That one I did get more lines as I was going back-and-forth also. That's interesting. Looking there, every ink is going to react a tiny bit different too, you might do the exact same thing, say with that bronze, which is this pretty blue. You may not get those lines in the same way. Each ink acts completely different, I might say, what is this going on here? Let's do something on this side. I might put some ink over here. Come with some alcohol. We can move that around if we want a little bit and maybe do our hair dryer. We can just let it sit and do its thing if we want. If I have a defined edge here, then I'm like, oh, I like that. But what about this edge here that I don't want to be there? Now is the perfect time to have a little bit of alcohol and a cloth that we can just wipe that edge with. I could either do it right on the paper and then come right up and clean it where I want to stop it. Look at that, how easy that is. If I have any spots on the paper that I don't like, I can just dab that with my finger. Then you'll get rid of any super sharp edge. Now another way that we could do that if we wanted to really come back and control a little bit. This is the time that I would grab one of my little paint brushes. I would have a little tub of alcohol, maybe. This one's got a little bit of color in it because I was using it with the other one. But alcohol reactivates alcohol so put a little bit of alcohol in that if you've got any color in there because you don't want to put your thing in there with color. Then look at wipes right out and it's clean. Then I can put a little bit alcohol in here and I can use a brush to very gently manipulate. Now remember that alcohol spreads and so you want to work on the tipiest part of something that you can if you're trying to clean it up. Don't get right on their heavy on the edge and think, "Oh, I'm going to be able to clean this up." It's going to spread, change your piece. Work very carefully when you're doing that. Tiny brush, tiny amount of alcohol, and just seeing, can we spread that around? Or is it going to change it? I hate it. Now that we did this right here, we can see I made an edge there, I didn't mean to put that on there into my paintbrush but I've made it an edge there, and so now I have to be like, do I like that edge or do I need to just reactivate that and use my dryer on it. If I did that and I'm like, oh, darn, I could just come back on here with a little more alcohol, then we could work it a little more. Which I might tell you I didn't add any ink in there, so I might come back with some ink and alcohol now that I've done that. Then let's say you do what I just did, so now we've got that way out there and it's like, "oh, what the heck did I do that for?". Now, look, and come back, do a little bit of cleanup, get it right back in where I want it to be, put the alcohol beside it, not right on top of the piece and work your way towards what you're trying to clean up. This cleanup practice really is valuable information to be practicing with on your pieces. Because now, the piece is not ruined, it's just, maybe we need to clean a little up. Like maybe I need to just get that little bit of an edge off of there, look at that I like the way that turned out. The only thing that's iffy is this little corner right here. Again, I can put a little tiny bit of ink, little alcohol on the outside the way I want the ink to go, and then I can spread that that way. I can use a little air gun if I wanted. That stayed very heavy, I'm actually just not happy with that right there. Let's say you hate the whole piece and you want to start over. Well, let's just maybe we do hate the whole piece, and let's just start all over. Watch this. It may take you 15 tries before you get one that you like. Oh my goodness, I love this. If you've got any ink on your towel you'll just spreading that back onto your piece. So let me just get a clean towel, and check it out. Check that out, and then, you can let that alcohol dry for a second. We could do again. After you play, wipe it off as many times as you need to wipe it off, until you get a one-color piece that you think, okay, I love this. You can go through and just like I did, scrap up any little areas that you like. Something's weird about that, let me just clean that little spot up, or you can have any little dabs of ink anywhere, you can just take your little towel with a tiny bit of alcohol on it and I do say tiny amount because alcohol spreads, so if you've got a whole lot alcohol on this paper and you touch anything that you didn't mean to, it'll spread right onto that. Be really careful with that. I want you to think. Look how cool this is? Then I want you to try something really fun that we haven't talked about yet, and get a little mini mister, and we can put alcohol in this, and then very lightly missed something to add some drama, some spots, some interests. What you might do is take just a little scrap piece of paper and you can miss the whole thing, or you can miss one certain part, maybe I just want this edge and maybe this edge and I don't want all of it. I can manipulate exactly, some of it, is a tiny bit wet, exactly where I put that. Maybe I just want it down here, and you spritz, look at this?. Look what that does. Depending on how what that alcohol still is, it may blend and merge a little bit and make an interesting texture, or it may be nice tight little dots. I really love that. I want to go up here. Oh, look at that. Make sure your ministers pointed the right way as pointing the other way. Look how cool that just made that. It just added some interest to a single-color abstract, so that's your first project. I want you to try the NARA paper, I want you to use one color, I want you to put alcohol and ink on that paper and moosh it around. If you're not happy with it, wipe it off with alcohol, and do it again, and do it 10 times if you need to, until you've got one that you like. That's pretty cool. This is the best paper to do that with. You can practice over and over and over again and you don't have to throw that paper away. That's my favorite, I love that one. I'll see you in the next project. 10. Two Colors With Gold Abstract: In this project, let's do two colors and some gold. I apologize again, the fans are on. But I want you to remember safety first. I want you to have your fans on. Let's go ahead. I've got the bronze. My two colors are going to be bronze and pea green. I think those are beautiful. My metallic is going to be this Pinata gold because this gold tends to sit on the top and move around and follow the edges and leave you a really pretty edge and everything. I've got all of that and I've got some alcohol right here. I'm trying to put these where I don't spill them everywhere. I have a tendency to knock things over. I got some shop towels ready over here. I also have my air gun and my blow dryer both handy. What I want to do is two colors, a little abstract with the gold. I'm going to start off putting the colors on there and letting them dry. I'm going to reactivate them with some color and some alcohol and some gold and just see what we can get. If you don't like the first try, wipe it all off and try again. That is what I love about this paper. A lot of times I don't get what I want the very first time, even though I've done alcohol ink now for a few years. I wouldn't say that it's my best supply that I use. It's not the thing that I think, this is my one thing because I think everything is my thing and that's why I experiment with so many different art supplies. But I would say that most of the time I get something that I like after sitting at my table creating. I want to say even then, I still wipe a few off and try again because abstract art, you just work at it. I work at it. Got my little dish here if I want to do some brushwork. Don't forget, you can put your finger in there to move it around too while it's all good and wet. Let's just go for it. I'm going to start with one color. Let's just move that around. There we go. Let's just add a second color in here. If we don't like it, I'll start again. I'm having an issue with my paper liking to blow, so I'm going to attach the very tippy, try to attach one little corner so that I'm not trying to hold the whole paper down. That's an interesting start. Let's just start adding a little bit of alcohol, a little bit of gold, a little bit of a color, and just run this around and see what we get. I just shook the gold up, so we should be good on the gold. Another thing I'll mention with this little guy, the tighter to the paper that you are, the more control you actually tend to have, so don't try to be super far away from it. I know I'm going in and out, but the tighter you are on the paper, the easier that ink seems to control. Let's see if I can, very gently just at the edges, give me a little more control look. That's already pretty like it is, though. Now I'm getting excited about it. Let's go ahead and just tap it a little bit of green, a little bit gold. Not too much. It's so easy to overdo it with the alcohol, that trying the less is more strategy is going to make that work a little better for us. Another thing too, the tighter we are to that paper, the wispier these edges are being. That's very fun. I'm going to go ahead the green again, a little tap of gold. Go ahead and get that alcohol. Then what I could've done is tape the paper down, that would have been a good idea, now that I'm running it all over the place and using the dryer. Let's put that, maybe a little bit of alcohol, just throwing that out there in case you want to tape your paper down a little bit. I am leaving some of it to dry itself a little bit just to see what we can get. I want to go just do a long one and see what we get, as I'm not going to inks over everywhere. Don't forget to use your glove if you feel like you need to blend in a little bit. Again, I'm keeping my air source tight to the paper and look at all these wispy, crazy yummy edges. I actually loved how the green mixing in with the blue. I think I'm going to keep up with the green and just have those little tiny spouts of blue shinning in there. A little bit of alcohol. I want to push that back in a little bit, maybe some gold. Look how cool that looks. There is one area here, then I'm like, am I loving it or do I not love it? Do I just want to wet that one area right there like this one area here to make it a little wispier and a little blend that in a little bit? Other than that I'm going gaga over everything else we've got going on here, and I think that's a little heart that got created right there in the middle. How cool is that? You can see it shining. I like seeing the gold shining the light. I love that. Maybe I'm thinking just this one little side that the alcohol is not as soft as it could be, so I'm just laying some alcohol down beside it. Alcohol runs, so what it did was run right in here. I don t think I like what it did there. I'm going to do one last little pass, green gold, little bit of alcohol and see if we can just merge that one little section in with the rest of our piece. I probably should have just did that. A little bit of gold, little bit of alcohol out here on the one side, and we'll let that run around a little bit and work that in. I could even take my thumb, my finger, and just put it where I want it. Can't get the only other thing now. Do you have any spots that you want to clear up? I do have this one spot right here, this spot right here. I want to clear that up. It's like a little extra ink sitting out there. Then I want to just clean this little area outside and I think I'll be happy with this. I love the little bits of gold that we can see sparkling that it's not 100 percent dry, but it's getting awful close. I'm just going to put a little bit of alcohol on the edge of my piece and very gently pull that from where I did not want that one spot. Alcohol spreads, so don't get it all over your piece. It'll spread that way, and then pick another clean edge because alcohol also re-spreads if you've got it on this towel thing. See, look at that. Much better. That is the way, people. That is the way. I know I'm being silly. But look how pretty that is now. Some of the things I'm looking for in an abstract that I like is movement, so do we have some nice movement and flow? With this paper, I'm especially also looking for some of these wispy edges because it's such a great paper for not staining that you can get the wispy edge without weird staining underneath. You can turn it different directions to be like, which is my favorite way. I'm almost liking this way. In addition to the way that I laid it down, I like this. Then so I like movement. I like light and dark, so you need some contrast in there, and then I also like interesting details. Like in this one, I like the little rungs that I got in the ink over here. It almost looks like a beautiful petal. I like the dark river we can see in the middle of the piece, and I like the gold bits that are shining on some of the edges, so metallics, that's another thing that I think adds a little bit of interest to your piece. Now we can always mark make on this after the fact. If we want to add some dots or some little extra details in gold, I could come back, especially with my Micah ink and paint on top of it. I'd be careful trying to paint on top of the alcohol ink with the alcohol gold, because remember, gold spreads and it reactivates the ink that's there, so you're more likely to put that on and it spread out weird, and you think, no, I ruined it. Whereas if I'm using an acrylic or water-based gold or paste that anchor that paste, I can paint right on top and continue adding details. The only thing is that this gold is probably going to be a different color than this gold, so you just might decide right up front, what are the things you're going to be adding. I do think that the Posca pen gold is very similar to the Pinata gold, so you might consider extra marks with the Posca pen. Like we could just come back on here right now. Let's just get that activated. Really, if I did a little bit of gold, I could do perfect thing would be to do some samples of all my metallics on a piece of my paper. That is so pretty. If I do a little thing of gold, let it spread out and do its thing, and I do a little thing of the Posca pen, I can see how far off is that color? Or if I'm just doing a dot, is it close enough to even matter? I think as a dot, it's close enough to not matter. As a line, that's questionable. But I do have the option. That's my point. But this one is so beautiful with the shimmer and the pieces that I've got in it that I think we're going to call that one good to go. First try, which sometimes, trust me, doesn't happen for me. I hope you have fun with two color and a metallic. Can't wait to see what those pieces look like, and I'll see you back in class. 11. Wispy Flower Accident: Let's do one more small one and then we'll do a bigger abstract. But I want to show you something cool that we could do. We could do an abstract with one color and some gold. I'm going to be using the Pinata Gold because I'm using this current and I want this gold to sit on the top. I'm going to be using my air gun and we're going to look at how we can push the ink in a specific direction. It's almost like I want to create a flower who is throwing its petals out there for the world to see and it's very proud. So I'm thinking like flower center, add some ink, a little gold, add some alcohol. We're going to shoot this off of the page and I've off centered it, hoping that I would like what the direction does. Drop of gold or drop of the current. Be careful because the gold drops were at once. Now I'm actually going to run these off the page, almost like we've got some petal definition. By the way, I run that air in that petal. So look at that. We're going to run all the petals that way. Then we could clean up some edges if we wanted. I could clean that edge off a little bit right there before we get any further where I dropped that gold accidentally. So maybe since I know I'm dropping that gold everywhere, I could put these to the other side of us. Before we get too far, I could go ahead if I wanted and clean off that spot if I needed to. Then I'm sure I'm going to have some more alcohol come back down that way so we can continue to just fix and go. But we could get to the end and just see, now what did we end up with and did we cover areas that we needed to cover? Let's just keep going. I'm going to run that air off, drag the alcohol content in the direction that I want it to go. I can control the edges a little bit just by blowing it back. Look at that. Do I sound like a nut? But man, it gets so excited with some of the way these things move. We're just going to pull this one on down this way. Yes, look at that. Let's just pull that, run the ink right there. Maybe a little extra ink right here. Extra alcohol can run that a little bit. I could have this on a paper towel to really soak off what it is that I'm knocking off. I could if I wanted to put a shop towel under that to really catch that as it's going off. Check that out right there. That looks like a cone flower kind of. I could put a petal on it and just call that done and make a greeting card out of it. That's really pretty just like it is. As a matter of fact, I could come back in with the gold ink or Posca pen, do some gold around this little petal here. I could actually come back with this gold, check this out. We might just have to call this flower done. Got my ink open, got one of my dip pens that I like, my little Kakimori dip pen. I could have a little sample piece of paper over here to start my dip just to see, am I going to get those dots the way I want it. Sometimes you just get the most perfect peace at the moment you did not expect it. We're going to say that it's about this piece right here. Look at that. See it shines pretty. Oh my goodness. Look how beautiful that is. First project, half a flower. What I think we can do now is go ahead and do what I was really going to do with the flowers splayed out all directions. But check that out, that is a gorgeous flower that I wasn't even expecting. So yummy. Now, we could come back and right on the edge if we wanted to, and just get some different things go in. I do have a little bit of gold that I have just noticed that got right here. Again, anything on here that you didn't want on here, just take a moment to clean that up, and then set that to the side before you ruin it. Oh my goodness. Look at that. We're going to save that one, and then we'll do another one with the whole flower. Let me grab a piece of paper and I'll be right back. 12. Running Ink To Edges: Let's do a flower again, but this time radiating out from the center. I think I'm going to try the garnet from the Copic and just see what we can get. I'm going to go ahead and just lay a center out here and let it dry. Then we'll come back and then splay out some petals. What I want to do is use my air gun for this and you can do it with a straw, but I want to run some ink, some gold, and some alcohol out in a direction. I like using the gun to do that because I can get real tight on it and create some layers and depth in that petal, so that's what I'm going to do. We're just going to help this along a little bit. Then we're going to lift it a little bit in the direction that I plan on going so it doesn't sink back too far in the other way. A little bit of ink, a little bit of the gold, some alcohol around and out in the direction I want to go. We'll let that just move that way a little bit as I grab my gun. Then you can see how I've made some lines in the petal. It adds some movement and some depth by coming in really tight with the air gun. That's pretty cool right there. Let's work out towards the corners and come back and fill in. Because it seems like every time I start going around and just do like one direction like I did on that pretty piece that we just kept. Most of the time I messed up before I get all the way out. Let's just go ahead and just start running that way and get the four corners and then maybe fill back in. Again, I'm just tilting in the direction I planned on mostly going. We'll pull the gun. Then mostly run in the alcohol off onto my towel there. Oh, yeah, I see pretty. Then that gives these other corners a chance to dry some more as we're working around. That alcohol moves fast. Check that out. I'm going to come back and we'll let that corner dry. Let's work in the center and start going around the four centers now and then we can come back and decide. Do we like what's happening in the middle here? Let's just do this. A little bit of gold. Got some alcohol, just run that, fill up our spaces. That's cool. If we have a spot that we're like, I don't know if I like that or not, we can always come back with another thing of ink and run it that way in a moment. Every time we put some ink here, we're reactivating the ink beside it, so we're going to have that. Let's run it out this way. It might work for you better to go around it clockwise instead of this little game. Hope I made a funny little edge there. Now we actually have basically a really close to a circular center there. We could at this point add a little bit of ink, maybe a little bit of gold, maybe a little bit of alcohol, and just let that spread and do its thing because the other alcohol that we've layer is going to do a pretty good job of stopping that fuss. Sorry, I had to stop that where I wanted it before it kept going. But already have in some of that. This ink that was dry acts a little bit as a barrier and makes it easier for us to then do other stuff like that where we can come back and have it in the center. Got my little scrap paper here. There we go. A little started. Maybe I'll come back for this. Then get the center going here with some gold. Look how pretty that is. Wipe that out. Another thing that we could do to add a little more interest on this is our spritz. Remember this piece. I want you to try out all the different little techniques just to see what you can get. On top of that, we could do a little spritz. I could do it in certain areas. I could let it do a direction. Let's see, I'm going to grab a clean piece of, we'll use this. I could let it just do some and block off the center there. Then I could come back and do a little here possibly or maybe we just like it looking like ribbons of yummy stuff. A little tiny mist here of alcohol. Well, I thought I had to go in the right way. I did not. Look what that just did. Oh, my goodness. I definitely want you all to try. Look at that. Well, that was way too much alcohol on that spot, but I just want you to give that a try and see. What can you get? See now, if you get too close and you missed it too hard, you don't get dots. You get it to run. Let me dry this a little bit. You got to be very careful there. What if we come back? I just ruined it. Let's start again. I can always do that. What if we just took this as a circle? I just wanted to protect that center part. Look at that. There we go. That felt like that fixed it. Super fun. This was more of a test of just try all of the different techniques on a little piece and show you the splay out which out of the two flowers are other flower is definitely the most gorgeous thing I've ever created. But it's all about experimenting with the different techniques as we move into a larger project. I will see you back in class. 13. Medium Abstract: In this video, let's do something a little bit larger. I've just got a piece of the 9 by 12 Nor Paper cut in half. Maybe we can do something a little bit longer. I've gone through my little color swatches, and I really like this pink Schubert. It's a really light, fun, color of smoky pink. I like this garnet maybe as a contrast. I could do one color with just the gold. Then I could tap in a little bit of a garnet and just see if that doesn't give us some excitement. I may hate it, but we're going to give it a try. That's my colors. I've already got these open out here on my table. The garnet is a Copic. The pink Schubert is the Tim Holtz Adirondacks. Then I've got the pinata gold out here, and we've got shaken up. We're ready to lay some ink. I also have a little hairdryer and my air gun, both over here and ready. You will hear the fans going. I apologize, I've got the ink going, so we want to think about safety. I know I keep mentioning safety all through class, but I want you to not forget it. I want it to be ingrained into your mind. Safety. I'm just going to lay some ink and then we're going to move it around a little bit and let it dry and do its thing. Then we'll come back and add some more ink and some gold and make it wispy and yummy. Let's just see what we can get. Have you tried different sizes, then we'll get different shapes and different things coming out of here. I think it's fun just to see what can we get if we just have some different shapes and sizes going on here. I'm just going to lay some alcohol around. I will just move this around a bit. Again, when I'm using this air dryer, I'm drying it a lot faster than it would normally dry. I'm only using it on the very lowest cool setting. While that's not cool, cold air, it is slightly warm. It's not hot, so it's not going to add to the flammability and the fumes of my ink and I love that. Look how cool this is looking. Just like that. Now we'll come back around and make some of this real wispy. Just so we can get, so I've got my inks ready. Might do a little here, maybe a little here, maybe a little gold. Definitely some alcohol. Wrap that. Move around a bit. Real soft with my air. Might come back along the edges with a little bit of alcohol and just below that in row wispy and soft. Again, as I'm using this heat gun, I'm not going directly down onto my piece. I'm coming from the side and the closer you are to the paper, the wispier these edges turn out, and look how beautiful that turned out. I'm liking this. Let's just go around and make it all wispy, and then that'll run some of this ink into the center. That will give us a yummy movement there as we're going in the center. Then some alcohol will start just moving around. You can use too much ink and too much alcohol. If you feel like you got way too much going on, try a lighter hand just to see, does that get you what you like? Definitely, you can do too much very easily. That felt like a lot alcohol on that piece. That's why I'm saying that. Don't forget, we can move this around with our fingers and really manipulate that even a little bit more. I'm just working my way around the page, getting rid of any tight lines, sharp lines, and making it real wispy by just running that ink back as I'm going. I've just got this little edge here. I need to run back in, so let's do this right here. Maybe a little tiny bit of gold, definitely some ink. Look how pretty this is. Now, if we've got any spots that are got any ink on it, let's just clean that up and then we can take a little look here and see what we think. What I love about this paper, you can just wipe away areas that aren't quite doing what you needed it to do. See, look at that. Oh, my gosh. Give you the right edge, right where you need it. Look how beautiful that is. Super pretty and wispy. I like the movement, I like the color, I like the little bit of gold in there. What we could also do is come back right now and add any mark-making that we'd like to add. We could also take our alcohol spritzer and spritz part of this. Get a little piece of paper here. Make sure that you go in the right direction. Maybe I need this spritz a little bit. Real soft, but it is a lot going on there. But look at that. I like that. That right there. I like that. That gave me a lot of extra movement. Check that out. How pretty that is? It's going to blend and do some funky stuff. Trying to let it dry here for a second. Just putting it in front of the fan there for a second. We could decide now, do we want to add any Posca pen, any mark-making, anything like that, that's going to add some interests or change it. Or maybe we want to use the ink and do some larger mark-making because there is some spots where the gold is doing something not quite as beautiful as a might've liked it like it didn't quiet move quite the same like right there. In that spot, do I want to camouflage that with some gold ink? Let's just do this. You could decide to just re-alcohol that and move it around some more or take this as a moment to work with what you have going on there and mark make. Your choice on how much you want to mark make. But I just want to incorporate maybe some of that a little bit. It might not be even a lot, but it can be a little tiny bit like add it to our little piece. Look how pretty that is. That's a pretty piece. I want to you do two color, as in this case, I did two colors that work in the same color range, but one was darker than the other, and a gold a little bit bigger, and just see what are the challenges when you go larger, it's definitely going to be working the piece longer because you've gone larger so it's more space to work around. I want you to not get into a super big hurry, and this is an instance where I found having the little handheld blow dryer makes everything so much easier, and you get that right down near the paper beside the piece and really manipulate that ink and it dries it a lot faster. Think you're going to have fun with some of the stuff, and I want to see a little bit larger piece and see what you come up with. I'll see you back in class. 14. Large Abstract: So I've got this juniper and I thought we would do a larger piece. I really love the way this juniper has so many colors within that one color, so you can tell there's some green and there's some blue. It separates out on this other paper, so cool, that I thought we would try it on this Nor Paper. I just like the color range that might possibly be in here. I've got some pinata gold because I liked the way it hugs the edges and it's very vibrant and beautiful. I've got my alcohol over here. I got our hoop. I've got ink on my finger. That's okay. We'll work that in or I'll wipe it off later. But I'm going to do maybe something larger, maybe coming down the page. Let's start thinking about our composition. If it's not the perfect composition when you're done, it doesn't matter. We can cut pieces out that we really love. I love to cut up art so we can certainly pick a section if the whole thing is not perfect. I don't want you to see how much longer does it take to make a big piece than a little piece and just see what are those challenges when we're doing this. I'm just going to start dropping some ink, coming down the way the angle here. Let's just see what can we get here? Then put some alcohol around some of these to get this to start moving. I want to use my little gun to start manipulating some of this color. This was definitely a good color to do this with because I can definitely see the separation of that color really beautifully so it looks like I've used 15 colors instead of one. But it's pretty cool. Let's just work our way around as best we can. A little bit of golden here, a little bit of alcohol. Try not to judge the piece as you're going. Just go ahead and go with the flow. Then when you get to a point, they're like, oh, this is looking pretty cool. Come back and get off any weird mistakes like any dots that you weren't where you want it on. Anything that's standing out as looking out of place. Then if you're just not sure if you love it or not, I would recommend you walk away and don't do anything else to it that day and come back tomorrow and look at it again because I can't tell you how many times I have done something and thought, "Oh no, I don't know if I like this or not," and then wipe it away. I got discouraged and didn't come back or did something else with it. Look at that. See? Now, that looks better that way. Then if I had just set it to the side because I'll take pictures of these and I'll come back later, I'm like, what was I thinking? That's amazing. What I really love about this piece. Love it this way, right here. Looking all the color in there that we got out of that one bottle of color. This was the juniper. There's so much color separating in that one color, it's not staining though. It's not staining the paper, but it's separating out of there. Look how amazing that is. Like I said, if you decide, I don't know if I love it or not, you can always come back with a piece of mat and start comparing different areas and thinking, oh, look at that, or, oh, check that out, so we could put a big mat around this. I do find that looking at it with a mat around it and this one's a little bit small, but looking at it with a mat around it completely changes the look and makes it look finished. Look how pretty that is. Even cutting off the top and the bottom. Because now it's got movement and it's got color and it's got a little bit of shine. I will say the one thing that's grabbing my eye is this little square that has resisted any ink. I just got something on this paper so let's just get that off. Might've been something on the back of that mat because I put it on every piece of art. Look how pretty that is. There is one piece right here is driving me a tiny bit insane because there's no color on it. I could try a brush with a little bit of the gold ink, or I could go ahead and do the mica. I hid the brush from myself. Here we go. You can try a little bit of ink. You got to be very gently doing this because alcohol spreads. Don't forget that. Then did I do enough? Do I like that color? I could come back with a little bit of juniper on my brush and I could see if that'll let me fill that in a little. It's not really doing what I want. I could go with Posca pen. I could fill it in with some Mica ink. The mica ink I know will definitely stay there. Got to be really careful with this ink. It just does its own little thing. I don't know. I just get some ink or I didn't mean to or might have. Make some little dots in there. We could do that. We can fill in with some shiny stuff a little bit further if we wanted. Really, I could just make some fun lines. I could follow some of these lines and just give me some extra shine in there. It's not as organic looking as what I already had on there. So if you're going to do that. I would definitely do it sparingly. Maybe I'll just do it as dots because I like dots. I don't like lines. The dots are a lot more whimsical. I do like just a little bit of whimsy, I think in something like this, less is more, but if you like doodlings and tangling and stuff, you could always doodlings and tangling around a pretty piece like this. But I do love how that turned out and I love the pretty little dots here on this end, so super fun. Checkout the finished piece. I'm loving that. I'm actually going to stop because I do love this quite a bit going this direction. I could even come back with a tiny bit of a speckle with my mister if I wanted to throw a little bit of that in there and the further I get away, the more subtle those might be. See, that's fine. I have the fan on over here. It's blowing it in different ways. See, that right there, just a little bit. Oh, yeah, look at that. I want you to go bigger. I want you to do a 9 by 12 or 10 by 15 or 11 by 16 or whatever size, large piece of paper you have. Go at a diagonal, run some ink down it, and then create a wispy abstract coming in with some more ink and some air, whether that air be from your air gun, your straw. I highly recommend the little dryer that is by far my favorite tool now when I'm working with alcohol inks, it dries it faster and it really gives me that pretty wispiness that I like. If you've never played with your little hairdryer on here, definitely do that on the coolest setting. I can't wait to see what these look like when you're done. So I will see you back in class. 15. Finishing Your Piece: In this video, let's talk about finishing your alcohol inks. Look how pretty all of these pieces turned out. I am telling you some of my favorite pieces. Now I've done in this class, look at these. I mean, they're just gorgeous. They're so gorgeous that you're going to want to find ways to extend their life and lengthen how long they're going be beautiful for. The reason I say that is because alcohol ink is not light fast. If you display this in an area where it's getting some good sunlight, these colors are going to just fade away. It's going be just a shell of what it was or you just might be gone. What you need to do, what I'm going to recommend that you do, especially if it's a piece that you love more than any other piece you've ever done is take steps to preserve these. The first step that you're going do is photograph it or scan it into your computer so that you can do a little color correcting if you need to. Then you can use this for prints. You can print a copy out that can be displayed anywhere. You don't have to worry about it being light fast anymore. Then you can store your original somewhere where it's not getting lots of light. That's the first thing that I would do before I did anything else. I would photograph or scan it into my computer so I have a permanent digital copy. The other thing that you'll want to consider doing is putting a varnish on top of these. That'll give it a nice protective finish coat. There's a couple of kinds of varnish that people talk about. They talk about doing a regular varnish, non yellowing acid free on the top first, and then coming back with a coat or two of a UV archival varnish on top of that to give it that UV protection. You're no longer concerned about the light damaging your piece. Now, I've tried both of these and I've heard that you should do the varnish first because it does a better job than doing the UV first. Depending on what UV you use, this is UV archival varnish also, so it's just more varnish. I've tried both of these on this piece of paper. I've put the common regular varnish here on this side. I've put the krylon or archival varnish on this side. Just from a visual standpoint, the regular varnish is a nicer finish. This UV varnish has a little heavier finish on it. I can see why you might want to varnish with the regular varnish and then maybe on top at the end, just a little bit of varnish because I can see this varnish building up and being really heavy. Whereas this varnish is very light and I don't know, It just looks better. Now that I'm looking at it in the light, it looks a little better. Normally, what you do with the varnish is if you could hang it up outside, maybe on like a little bowl clip somewhere just so that you can hang it up. That's a really good way to get your best finished because then you're not spraying down on something, you're spraying towards something. You want to start this spray I'm not going to spray in the office, but you want to start spraying off your piece. Don't just put it here and start the spray because let's say this was a clogged nozzle and all of a sudden you unclogged it and a bunch of goop landed on your piece. That would be very upsetting. Then I really do hope that you made a copy of that by photographing it or scanning it. You want to start spraying off of your piece. Then you want to come onto your piece and then go off to your piece. You don't want to stop and start right on your piece because you'll build up a lot of extra varnish on the edges that then might run and drip. You want to go all the way off and all the way off on both sides. You want to be good say foot and a half, like 12 to 15 inches away. You want to do several passes, let that dry. Do another layer, let that dry. You want very thin layers, three or four very thin layers. Then once those are all dry, you could come back with your UV protector as a top finish. Then your piece would be a lot more protected for a lot longer and hopefully give you a little bit of sun protection. Finishing your pieces, That's what I would recommend just from my own experience. Definitely make a copy of your pieces before you do anything else. Photograph it or scan it, so you have it for later. All right, I'll see you back in class. 16. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] I know now that you have watched the ink and probably played with the ink, that you'll definitely agree with me that the alcohol ink is the most uncontrollable art supply that I've ever played with. The alcohol just keeps on spreading and go in and you got to work a little bit fast to start corraling it into the space that you want it to stay in or it just goes in places that you're like, "I didn't want it to go there." [LAUGHTER] In today's class, what did you think has the Nora paper? Oh, my goodness. This paper was not available years ago. It was only introduced just a couple of years ago, and I use the YUPO, and then more recently than that I'd played on mineral paper. The most frustrating thing about that is they stain. You can't just wipe the ink off and try again. That's basically a wasted piece of paper. You don't feel like you can practice nearly as much as if you had a cheaper paper to play on. This Nora paper is basically the gift that keeps on giving. You can do a piece on it and you can wipe it away with some alcohol and you could do another piece on it and you can wipe it away with some alcohol. Instead of having 100 packs of paper to get to the point that you're creating really good art, now you need one pack of paper and some alcohol to wipe it back off. I just think that is amazing. For me, it's a game changer because now I'm not hampered by the cost of the paper and the cost of the ink and the practice that I need to do to get really good. Now, I'm not hampered in by that because the ink goes a long way. It last forever. I'll probably have the bottle of ink I have for as long as I do art but the paper, now that's a cost, that's a barrier for how much you can practice and do. The Nora paper removed that barrier. Now, I can just practice as many times as I want and I don't feel like I'm spending any extra money. It really has removed a big barrier for a lot of people for creating alcohol and pieces, because alcohol ink is not as easy as you think. It takes a little bit of practice and go in before you end up with the pieces that you like. I love this Nora paper to help you do that without spending all your money on paper. [LAUGHTER] I hope you love that new discovery. Also, the blow dryer oh, my goodness. I have taken lots of alcohol ink classes years and years ago, and not one person used a dryer. Now I see on Instagram everybody has that little upright drier and I'm like, "What is that?" [LAUGHTER] I showed you in class what that is. It's just basically a hair curl or without the curling apparatus on the top. How cool is that? I hope you enjoy exploring all the different things I'm bringing to you in class today. It's not something that I see a lot of people share what they're using. I hope that this discovery helps you make incredible pieces that you are going to love. I'll see you next time. [MUSIC]