Oceanic Mixed Media Tile with Alcohol Ink Class

1. Oceanic Mixed Media Tile with Alcohol Ink Class: Welcome to the oceanic mixed media tile class. I love using alcohol inks and especially using them on tiles and then mixing them with other projects, products to create different scenes and different creations. In this class we're gonna do it mixed media tile that's got an oceanic theme to it. Let's go take a look. So this here is the tile that we're gonna be creating. We're going to start with the plane ceramic tile. And I'm going to show you how to put the alcohol ink based on and then just adding the different layers in steps as we create this project. This class comes with a supply list that will list all the supplies used for each of the steps. And it'll be linked to where you can purchase those supplies and have them delivered to your house if you choose. But it's also a great resource for knowing exactly what you're going to need before you start your project. Let's go create some mixed media. 2. Creating the Alcohol Ink Background: Alright, so the very first step in creating our piece is to clean your tile. We want to make sure we get any fingerprints off of it. And he does just any imperfections or anything that could react with the ink. And all I did was spray some 99% isopropyl alcohol and clean it off with a paper towel. I'm going to use a Copic refill. For the background. Kopecks are just alcohol ink markers and the refill is just to refill the marker itself. You could use you could use regular alcohol inks like from ranger, whatever. I just wanted to use this because I really liked the color. This is gonna be my top, this is gonna be my bottom. So I'm gonna be using less of the color on the top so that I have a gradation from light to dark. So in both of these things is the same thing. It's 99% isopropyl alcohol. I'm going to use a hair tool for moving it around. This has two speeds and it also has two settings. So I'm using it on a cool setting and on the low speed so that I have a little bit more control over moving my anchor around. Before I turn that on, I'm just going to try to get the inks to the corners. I want to get a nice complete coverage here. There's several things extra that are going on to this tile, but I want to make sure that I get full coverage of the ink on the backgrounds. Their use my tool to be blowing the inks around. I think I want a little bit more color to the bottom here. So I'm just going to put just a little bit more color and a little bit more isopropyl. The spray bottle is good to spray the entire thing, to get the isopropyl over the whole thing. The dropper is good to get it in certain areas. You're gonna get some naturally dark areas. Basically you're using your tool to move it around while it dries. There is gonna be a point where it's just too thick. You can't really move it around. You can add more ink if you feel it needs more ink. I like the lights and darks of this. Then. I mean, I really I like it. But the off chance that you finished and you're like, I don't really like it or I don't like how it finished. You can use a spray bottle with some isopropyl, wet the whole thing and redo it. If it really gets to the point where you really just don't like it. You can use the spray. You can completely wipe your tile clean. Using tiles are a great tool for people, especially when they're new to alcohol inks. Because it's a surface that's very forgivable. You can easily clean it up and completely wipe it clean if you don't like it. Now again, I quite like I like all the texture to it. I'm leaving like that. But if you wanted to add some more ink, you could. But just look at what happens when you add more ink. So it does give a little bit of a line which is totally fine. Remember, we're going to have a whole bunch of stuff in this bottom here. The title is a great way for people that are new with alcohol inks to play and learn. Because like I said, you can completely wipe it down and start from scratch if you want. A little bit more in this corner here, just to get some of that whitespace out of there. An Isopropyl helps thin it out, but it also helps it move and flow. Anytime I add more alcohol and add more isopropyl as well. Because I do want it to spread out a little bit more. The areas that get really dark and you can either let them completely dry or just add some more isopropyl, spread it around a little bit more. I'm just going to add a little bit more ink and this white area here, just to darken it a little bit. Alright, so some of these really dark areas are really, really thick ink. I do let it sit for about an hour to get those completely dry. Before I move on to the next step, you can use your tool to speed it up. But really the only way to check if it's dry is to touch it and if it's not dry and it's still thick and sticky, you're just gonna be lifting ink up. So rather than risk that, I'm just going to leave it or tear to dry completely for about an hour or so, and then we'll be back for the next step. 3. Adding Alcohol Ink Texture to the Background: Alright, my alcohol ink is completely dry. So now we're going to add some texture to the background. If you didn't want to, you don't have to do that. Or to add texture to the background, you could do just leave your background as is. But I just got this stamp in and wanted to add some bubbled texture to the background. So what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna spray a light mist of my isopropyl alcohol on there. I'm going to stamp it. I'm going to clean my stamp off again and then I'm gonna do it again on the bottom. So make sure to have a piece of paper towel nearby. I've already used this mode, but we might as well use it again. Don't spray this over top of here because spray is gonna go on there. So spray it to the side. Just three little sprays is all I need. I'm pressing it firmly and wall. It is still wet. I'm going to lift this up and just dab the excess off of there. But look at all the texture that it creates. I just love seeing that texture there. A super easy way to do it as well, to add texture to your background. And once again, you don't have to. But I just thought that I'm just going to dab at that little line. I just don't want to have it as permanent. I just thought it was a great way to add a bubble texture to the background and use a stamp in the process. But like I said, you don't necessarily have to do that. I just like that texture. The other thing that you can do is use alcohol markers to add some texture to your piece. So I'm just going to create some seaweed. So I'm just going to get some scrap paper because it is going to pick up some of the color from the background. So I'm going to use my scrap paper to clean my marker off periodically. And all I'm doing for this, I'm just pressing the side of my marker. It makes a little teardrop shape which looks kinda like a leaf, which I thought was perfect for some seaweed. Obviously I'm doing it in green, but you could do it in whatever color you want. But it's really neat how it reacts to the alcohol ink in the background and create some more texture. Now some of these thick areas, I'm just kinda trying to avoid them simply because it's not going to really pick up that alcohol ink. Let's do another one. I'm going to do another. Thin-walled are small and right here, you can do as many or as few of these as you want. I'm just doing a couple on this side and then I'll just do probably just one on the other side. And then I've got some coral that we're going to put in this corner here. So I don't really need to go too far down because you're really not going to actually see that part anyways. And they've also got coral down here. So I'm gonna make this one a little bit higher, just so that you can see it a little bit. If you want, you can do just go down one side. It ends up making it a little bit quicker. And go down the other side. I like the rule of odd numbers, so I want to put just one more in this corner here. Where you go. If you didn't like how if you wanted them to be a little bit more prominent, once they're dry, you can go back over them again and just make them a little bit more prominent. But there we go, some seaweed in the background. We'll let that dry for a couple of minutes and it doesn't take very long. It the alcohol ink dissipates and dries quite quickly. So the next step after this is we're going to use some texture paste and put some coral on the corners. 4. Adding the Coral: So our next step is adding coral to our piece. So I've got this coral stencil here that we're going to use. Now, there's a lot of little pieces from this stencil that are really easy for to catch when you're applying central paste for this stencil, I like to I like to start from the tops and move my way down so as not to catch those things because they seem to be. If you go up, you start to catch them. So I've got my texture paste here. I'm going to color it with some alcohol ink. This alcohol ink color happens to be called coral, so I thought it was appropriate. So you can make it as dark as you want it to be. I don't want it to be super, super dark. Here's my, here's my sample here, so it's not super, super dark. And then we're going to add some copper and gold leafing wax to it. So it's not gonna be just this way or showing this way, but when she mixed it, if you want it a little bit darker, you can add more drops of alcohol ink. You don't want to get it to r10 though. Keep in mind because the texture paste is white is always going to be lighter than the alcohol ink color that you're using. Alright, so I'm gonna put a little bit in this corner. Lay my stencil flat, and then I'm running my palette knife evenly over my stencil. I'm not putting a huge amount on there. You want to be able to see your stencil through it. Otherwise, you are the amount that you're adding is just too big. Make this side a little bit taller than the other side. So put some texture paste on my palette knife there. Then once you're done adding your face, you want to let it dry completely before you move to the next step. Your stencil needs to be cleaned off right away. It's gonna be harder to clean it off once it's completely dry. So clean it off while it's still wet and then clean your surface off. But I'll see you in a bit once this is all dry and we'll continue. Our texture paste is completely dry. Now, to add just a little bit of shine to it, we're going to put some boundary wax. So this is a liquid leaking wax. Here, a little balls in there. You want to make sure it's shaken up really, really well before you put some on your surface, you don't need a whole lot and it dries up pretty quick. So you definitely don't want to be putting a whole lot on your surface. I like to use my fingers to apply it with a really, really light touch. I'm just trying to get it on some of the raised edges of the texture paste. The one is a coppery color. Then I'm also going to do a little bit of this one which is a bit of a goal, but it's not a yellow gold. That is too much, but you can see I mix it a little bit till it thickens up a little bit just because I find if I do it right away, then I get a little bit heavy handed with it. I'm trying to put it on areas that I don't have the other color on because I don't want to be covering up what I just put a little bit heavy handed, but there's stuff going there as well. So some of that might be covered up. Doing this just adds a little bit of a different texture. You could also use, say, an acrylic paint. If you wanted to. I just really, really liked the look of this leafing wax. So that is only going to take a couple of seconds to dry. But to clean this up, I just need some isopropyl alcohol. Spray. It don't spray it. Don't let the over spray go on your project. Then it just cleans up super, super easy. Typically if I wish just crafting on my own, I would find something else to use the rest of that, the gold colored one on rather than just waste it like that. But there we go. So now to let that leafing come out and I'm gonna move these out of the way because you don't want to let to let the heat gun get near the bottle, otherwise it'll harden and the bottle. I'm going to use my heat gun or my embossing gun. And I'm going to put it on all the areas that I had, the wax and it's going to just let the leafing come to the surface. I definitely have more gold on there then the copper colors don't want to add a little bit more of the coppery color. Once again, just light handed. One of those things. It's much easier to add more to it if you want more. But if there's too much on there, you can't really take it away. So there we go, That's better. Alright, I'll clean this up and I'll see you in the next video and we'll start working on the jellyfish. 5. Adding the Jellyfish: So now we're ready to add our jellyfish. Now, when I create a class, I usually do a sample just to kinda see how it's going to look if it comes together, like it's going to do in my head. So one thing I didn't like about the sample is I used to read pearl embossing powder for the image of the jellyfish and it didn't stand out enough. So I played around with some spirit tiles to see which one I liked better. I tried some rose gold and it was okay, It stood out better than the first one. But I actually really liked how the white ones stood out. So I'm going to do this one here with white embossing powder. So I've got my stamp here. If you're good at drawing, you could always try to draw your image. But what we're doing with this stamp is we're going to stamp it and we're going to emboss it. And that embossing powder, once it's melted, it's going to leave a raised edge and then we're going to play around with that. So you want to put your stamp where you want it in your piece. Hold it steady with one hand while you press with the other, make sure you get a good impression. Lift it up. You're not gonna be able to see the image. If you go to the side, you can see the reflection from the light on it. Now you're gonna put your embossing powder, few chunks there. Now you may have parts of your alcohol ink that are a little bit sticky that the embossing powder is sticking to like right there. There's just a clump, but for some reason it's wanting to stick. When you're using embossing powder on a tile or, sorry, when you're using embossing powder on paper, it's really easy to tap it to get the excess off. It's a little bit harder with a tile because there's not the flexibility to it. But before you melt anything, if there is powder anywhere that you don't want it to be, you want to take a soft brush and you want to brush it away. Once we have it melted, it's going to be stuck in place. We're not gonna be able to get it off easily. So better to take it off now than regret that it's there. So put the powder away. Check it one last time. There is a few dots of powder, but I actually don't mind a few dots here and there. I just don't want it to be overwhelmingly a lot of powder. Now, I'm using a heat gun and Boston Gun to melt the powder. Remember that we have a ceramic tiles. Ceramic tends to be cold, so it's going to take a little bit longer to emboss this than it normally would if we were embossing on paper because it also has to heat the tile. Alright. So as I was working, I'm not sure if you can see it on screen. It goes from being a mat granular texture, too smooth and glossy while you're melting it. So what I'm going to do is I want to take some of the alcohol ink from behind those jellyfish just to make them a little bit wider so that we can see what the next step that we're gonna do a little bit better. So I'm actually going to do it. So I got to put a little bit of isopropyl alcohol in a little base in there. And I'm actually going to just use a Q-tip and remove some of it. Now you'll notice that the alcohol ink is going over top of the embossing powder and coloring it. There's not really any way to avoid that. And some of those details we're not going to really need for the next step. Anyways. What we're going to do for the next step is put some Perl alcohol ink in those areas to resemble the way jellyfish, you know how they look a little bit transparent, a little bit. Foggy a little bit pearly. We're trying to get that look to it. And I don't need to get all of this alcohol ink off. I just want to get a good portion of it off. Here we go. Hardest one is the bigger jellyfish just because that alcohol ink lakes to dry while you're doing it. So there we go, make sure to get this out of the way. Best way to do this is I have a little paint tray here. If you have a little, say a bottle cap or something, you could put your alcohol in that in order to move it around. And now, where did my Perl Perl alcohol ink is a mixed motive, like a metallic. It's got a little metal ball in there. The pigment goes to the bottom. You want to make sure to shake it up really, really well. And all I'm going to do is put some into that section of the jellyfish. And I'm using the tip of my alcohol ink bottle here to move it around a little bit. I don't want a super thick layer, but I do want an even layer. So by using the tip of the bottle to help move it around, I can just even that layer out a little bit. Seems to be a little bit clogged. 1 second here. There we go. Definitely. If it gets clogged, you definitely don't want to squeeze it out on your project. You want to do it on the side. Oops. I don't want to do that, but I'm just going to leave that where it is anyways. Just doesn't seem to like this one. Little jelly fish here. So I'm just going to lift it up for my surface, move it onto there. Now for the most part, the raised area from the embossing should keep it all within the area of the jellyfish. But if you happen to go over that, it's going to move. I wouldn't worry about it too much. Alright. I'm going to let that dry for a few minutes. It shouldn't take too long. This one is mostly dry and the other two are mostly dry. But I'm going to pause for a moment and let that dry. My alcohol ink is dry and I want to make the tops of those jellyfish have a little bit of a glossy look to them. I've got some glossy accents here. I'm going to fill in those areas. I want them to have some dimension. And just to have a glossy finish, you don't necessarily need to do this step, but I just thought that extra little bit of texture would make them pop a little bit. I'm gonna do it on all of them. The easiest way I find to use Glossy Accents is I forgot to put the parole on that little guy there, but that's okay. Go around the edges and then flood the inside part is kind of as if you're making a cookie. There is, typically if this was on paper, I'd let it dry for a few hours. But because paper dries from both the bottom part as well as the apart because it's porous. Ceramic is not as only drawing from the top. I'm going to let this completely dry overnight and not touch it until tomorrow. 6. Creating & Adding the Seaweed: So while we wait for our jellyfish to dry, we're going to prepare some acetate to create seaweed out of. Now, in some classes I've used some acetate that is heat resistant. This is not as regular old acetate. I think it's actually like projection screen sheets or whatever it was. This was a hand-me-down from someone at some point who is a smoker, which is why it's all just discolored and everything. And it does not like heat. So once we stick a heat gun to it, it is going to warp and move and stuff like that. But we're going to use it to our advantage and create some seaweed with it. I've got my alcohol ink on there. Let's color it green because I want it to look a little bit more like seaweed. So I've got two different colors of alcohol. One, I've got two different colors of alcohol. Eighth one would have been enough. I didn't necessarily need to use to, but I always typically like it when it's got some different colors, some lights and darks in it. Let's get some more isopropyl on there to move it around a little bit more. Doesn't necessarily need to be a 100% covered, but we want it mostly covered with the color. You can take like alcohol ink markers and just color it if you wanted. But then you tend to, when you're working on plastic, you tend to get a little bit lines and streets with alcohol markers, but you don't get that with working with the liquid alcoholics. And I'm doing this on a piece of paper so that any of those bits that go off of there just go right into the piece of paper. And I don't have to worry about getting alcohol income, my work surface. The nice thing about once you get a little bit of alcohol and underneath it, it tends to hold your piece of acetate down, which is quite handy. Alright, I'm going to let that finish drawing just on its own. It's not going to take very long. And then I will show you how we're going to turn that into seaweed. Alright, our acetate with alcohol ink is completely dry. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to cut it into little strips. It doesn't necessarily have to be straight lines that you're cutting. Wavy lines. I'm just making sure that it ends in a tip. Now you need a heat gun. You want something that has some heat to it. And I'm going to be moving along the acetate and it is going to start bending and warping. And sometimes it's going to come back on itself. And if you're quick enough, you can put your heat gun down and then straight and a little bit so that you can kind of get it. So it's not all too weird looking. Alright? That if it does that, you can, while it's still warm, you can straighten it out a little bit. Sometimes I will leave it. Alright, I'm going to leave that. So it'll be soft right away and then it will cool quite quickly. And what you can also do while you're doing it is you can put your piece on your project just to kind of get an idea of how it's going to look and start laying them out. So depending on the plastic that you have, it's going to react a little bit different to the heat gun. You could also use recycled some food packaging and that sort of thing. But that's kind of part of what I like about it is that it reacts a little bit different. It just creates more natural looking seaweed because it doesn't react in a certain way. Here we go. You can cut them. Obviously it's shorter to suit your needs and how you want it to lay. I'm gonna do one more. I'm trying to get three on each side. There we go. Now to glue them in place. I'm going to glue them with some Glossy Accents. You want something that is very strong and is going to be able to hold it in place securely while it is dry. Now my jellyfish are actually still not dry. I wanted to get this done so that this could dry overnight with the jellyfish as well. I think I'm going to shorten that so that it gets better contact with the surface. And once you've got your glossy accents on here, you want to let it sit too dry and not move it, which is why I wanted to get this done so that it could dry at the same time as my jelly Fischer drawing. Last piece. There we go. Alright, going to let that dry completely. I will see you tomorrow and we'll continue. 7. Adding the Final Details: Jellyfish and our seaweed have dried overnight. So now it's time to add some final details. I've got some shells that we're going to add to the bottom. I've got a few die cuts. First thing I'm gonna do though, is I'm going to take this rose gold acrylic paint and I'm going to hit the edges of the tile just to give it a nice finished look. You could also do this with the color of alcohol and can be used for the background. But if you wanted to do it that way, I would have done it. When we were doing the alcohol ink background. I chose to do a different color just so that it was a little bit, kind of framed it in a little bit. And really some of this could be done afterwards, but underneath the shells we're gonna glue some sand and I wanted the bottom part painted before that sand goes on. Mice will paint it all at the same time. Hey everybody go. One code is probably enough if you find after doing one coat that you need another than absolutely add a second one. You might notice some of the dye cuts that I've got here are the same color. And it was because I didn't have card stock that color. So I just took regular card stock, a regular car stops graph actually, and painted a color. And then when it was dry, I die cut my pieces. A super easy way to get something to match without having to buy specific card stock and trying to match it. So there we go. That is done. Normally, I'd let that dry before we go to the next next part, but I'm going to just pause a minute, clean this up, and that'll be alright, so we're cleaned up time to glue or dicots and I only have, I only die cut one of the leaves. I didn't think it needed a whole lot more. I just wanted the seaweed and stuff like that to pop a little bit more. So I'm just gonna put this behind it. Then I'm going to put the seahorse on this side. Don't need glue around the whole thing just a little bit to hold the nose down and then I put a little bit behind the tail so that it could hold onto the seaweed. At my little crab die cuts here. I just did them out of some Kraft stock. But I'm going to take some ink and ink around them just to give it a little bit more dimension. And obviously you could die, cut them out of a different color as well. I just wanted them to look. I didn't want them to pop out too much. I wanted them to be there but not be too much, basically. Alright, crabs getting stuck in the seaweed here. I'm just going to put them in the front. Alright, I need new glue. I'm just going to use my glossy accents that I was using yesterday. Normally I wouldn't use the glossy accents just because if anything peaks out from underneath, It's going to be a glossy finish to it. Which is why I was using the distress collage medium. But I don't want to play around with it too much. Alright, I've got a sand dollar here. Can I add that to the bottom? Whatever glue you do use, you want to make sure that it sticks really, really well. And I've got a starfish here. So that's why I use the distress collage medium and the glossy accents. I know both of them are going to stick really, really well and hold everything in place. Now some shells. So I have just have a bunch of shelves here that I've had for my resin stuff. You could also, if you live near a beach, go to a beach and gather some, make sure you don't gather any width, any critters living in them. Another thing that I have done in the past is gone to thrift stores and found shell necklaces and taking them apart. The only thing then is you have to be aware that there's gonna be holes in both sides of them for the string to go through. But another good way to recycle, I'm going to put some blue are directly down there. You can put as many or as few as you'd like. I'm not putting it over the whole bottom. I'm just putting it over the two sides, basically. Put some blue there. The nice thing about using a liquid glue for this is until it's dry. You can move things around. So if you put something down, you don't really like it, you can move it up. So I'm going to let that completely dry. And then once that's dry, I'll be back and we'll put some sand on the bottom. Alright, so our shelves or dry at the bottom, I'm just taking a paint pen and I'm just going to draw in the crabs eyes. Another thing you can do is take that same rose gold paint and add just some accents to the crap. I'm going to leave it on this one because I think it looks alright as it is. The other thing that I did on my sample that I haven't done it yet because I'm taking that same pearl mix. I'm just adding a little bit to the center roughly tentacle part here. I didn't wanna do it earlier because I didn't want to mess up the glossy accents while it was drying. But just give that a little bit more. Make it show up a little bit more. And now we can add our sand. So I am using the distress collage medium for this because I want to make sure that I don't have once it's dry, I don't want it to be glossy underneath the sand. Just squeezing a bunch on basically below the shells. I want it to look like they're sitting in the sand. The sand that I have is just play box and tap it off on my scrap paper and let that dry completely. And once that's dry, I'll see you in the next video and we'll add a hanger to the back. 8. Attaching a Hangar to the back of your Piece: Alright, so if you're planning on just quitting your piece on a shelf to lean against something. It is done. If not, we are going to add a hanger to the back. Now it doesn't look super pretty, but it's definitely functional if you want to hang it onto a wall and I'm just using some gorillas superglue gel to do it. I'm going to turn the tile over. I'm going to take a ruler and I'm going to mark the halfway point because I want to make sure that it is centered. This tile is six inches, so three inches is right in there. Put some glue and I tend to put a lot because I want to make sure that it is stuck for good. I don't want it to fall off the wall, so I probably do a little bit of overkill, but personally, I'd rather overkill then. Finding a tile broken because it didn't hold. I'm lining the hole in my little hanger here and the little triangle part there to the top. You could also use one of those sawtooth hangers as well and just glue on the sides of that. And then I just leave it at night, just left it completely overnight. I checked it after about an hour and because I'd use so much, it was still soft. So I will leave it completely overnight so that it's totally dried before touching it and moving it over or hanging it. 9. To Spray or Not to Spray: So I'm going to leave my piece as is. I'm not going to spray anything on it. I plan on hanging it in the bathroom. It's not going to be near anything that is going to react with the alcohol ink. The only thing that would react with the alcoholic is an alcohol spray or even an aerosol spray. These ones will be fine. So if you were wanting to finish yours and spray it to have it protected, the very first spray you need to use is the Kamar burnish, several light coats letting them dry in-between. This does not react with the alcohol ink. The only time this has ever reacted with the alcohol ink was someone that I had heard that they just doused it with a ton of it. So that's why I say several light coats letting it dry in-between. Afterwards, if you want to put a UV resist spray on there, this is the one that you would use. This one is Matt. You can also get it in gloss. And then after that, if you wanted to spray it with a gloss finish or matte finish or whatever, something other than what you have in your UV resist spray, you can do that. But just keep in mind then if you spray it with glass gloss spray or a mat spray, it is all going to be gloss are all gonna be mad Unless you mask off different sections so that they have a bit of a different texture to them. And that's the main reason why I'm not spraying anything. I like. The finish of the alcohol ink that the texture pace is a little bit different like a lake, how they all have different finishes to them. But if you want to spray them, these are the what you need to do to use to do that. 10. Oceanic Mixed Media Tile with Alcohol Ink Class Thank You: Thank you so much for joining me for the oceanic mixed media class. I hope you enjoyed learning the process and all the different steps that are involved and how to layer and add different things to your piece. And I hope it inspired use for some future projects. I'll see you in class again soon.