Alcohol ink explosion!

Slowly but surely, I’m remembering play. I’m coaching myself to take a deep breath and just dive in. Today I “dove into” alcohol inks. I’ve rarely used alcohol inks before, just the couple of times been when friends from the NEATC group let me borrow theirs. My aunt gave me two sets of Ranger alcohol inks for Christmas, in Nature Walk and Farmer’s Market. To complete my “starter set” I ordered an applicator from eBay, and bought a bottle of 91% isopropyl alcohol from the grocery store (rather than using Ranger’s pricey mixative).

I had lots of fun just experimenting with different amounts of ink and rubbing alcohol, and on different surfaces. I found that glossy photo paper is a great place to start when learning to work with alcohol inks, as it’s a nice slick surface that’s fairly cheap and can be cut into backgrounds or elements as you please. I tried my hand at inking brass charms, but I’m not sure how pleased I am with the result so far. The nice thing about alcohol inks is that you can often come back and rework a piece with more inks or mixative. But the real triumph of today’s playtime was definitely the wooden star pictured here. Originally a plain silver star from a value pack of gold and silver stars and moons, I added dots of ink (Eggplant, Wild Plum, and Stream) directly to the glossy painted surface and “smooshed” them around with the applicator. Having really enjoyed the look of the rub-on letters used often in the pages of Visual Chronicles, I decided to dig out the sheet that worked it’s way into my collection at some point. I didn’t have a fancy stylus, so I just used a mechanical pencil with the lead pushed all the way in. I’m not sure yet what to do with this delightful little treasure, but it makes me smile every time I look at it. I’m on my way.

(And yes, “smoosh” is the technical term! Ok, Ranger says to “randomly stamp and twist” but I find “smoosh” to be far more succinct.)

Make It Mondays – Orange

I figured I’d take a break from cleaning up the studio to jump back into making art with both feet. A challenge seemed a good place to start, so I took up the Orange challenge over at Lisa Vollrath’s Make It Mondays. I’ve never participated in Make It mondays before (or any other blog challenge for that matter) and I had a lot of fun with it. This was an interesting challenge; color challenges seem to have an interesting effect on me. They are deceptively simple, but I always find that interesting themes and meanings can surface.

I find color challenges tend to follow a pattern for me. I took some pictures of the process to illustrate how I make color-themed collages. First, I sort through all my bins of collage papers and pull out elements of the color in question. My collage elements are all sorted into obsessive little 8.5″x11″ clear plastic bins. I started with the “Orange” bin of course, but I ended up finding loads more scattered throughout bins such as “Postal,” “People” and “Misc Collagey Elements”.

Once I’ve gathered up plenty of elements, I sort them out into potential backgrounds, smaller images, and ATC blanks. As you can see from the photo, I also pulled a few orange pigments out at this point – craft acrylics, a Sharpie, and a pigment inkpad. I find it’s very useful to have some pigments on hand, especially for color challenges. You never know what the right thing is going to be to tie it all together. Which I guess is the reason I pull so many elements out… when the only requirement in that you use a certain color, it can be hard to predict what sorts of elements will work.

After all this fiddly preliminary stuff is when the magic happens. I start arranging things, playing around, keeping an eye out to see what themes present themselves. For the color orange, I found that the themes that surfaced were an exotic Far East theme, a city heat-wave theme, and a summer morning theme. As you can see, it was the summer morning theme that I ended up going with. (The inkpad came in handy to highlight the edges of the cards and blend the elements together.) I’m hoping to work on the other two cards tomorrow, but it started to feel like something of a heat-wave in the studio so I decided to call it a night after the first card.