My cousin-in-law invited another cousin and I over this weekend to help her with a project. She has gotten into art using alcohol paints, where she creates pictures on glass. Like this:
This was a small picture frame, about 20cm x 20cm. Her next project was to do a much larger frame, and she thought that she would need two people to help. I'd never come across alcohol inks before and the process was fascinating. We all had a go!
You start with a picture frame and remove the glass from it.
We cleaned the glass, to make sure that it didn't have any dust or fingerprints on it that would be immortalised in the finished product.
Things we needed:
- foil-covered tray to work on
- alcohol inks
- iso-propyl alcohol
- fire lighter
You can see the marks from previous sessions on the tray.
It was hard to choose a combination of inks, I wanted to use them all! But whatever you chose, you ended up with stained on your fingers!
Though the inks themselves are alcohol-based, adding the iso-propyl alcohol to them creates a larger, different effect. We used syringes to drip it on.
We had to work fast in this medium, because the alcohol would dry out very quickly.
Step 1 - add the colours to the glass, drip by drip.
Step 2 - add the iso-propyl alcohol. See how the spots of colour expanded with the extra alcohol added? We tried two methods. This first one was with a syringe, which gave a blotchy effect.
This second one was using a spray bottle. This had a slightly different effect, making splatters with the ink.
Step 3 - swirl or move the glass for the effect that you wanted.
Step 4 - LIGHT IT ON FIRE.
The fire sets the ink, who'd have known? It only burned for a few seconds, but it was a bit freaky the first time!
At this point it didn't always look amazing....
But then you put them on white paper and the colours come out. This was my first one and I love it!
My other cousin did this one:
And this one:
Once they had sat out for a little while, we could put them back in their frames. The side that the ink is on faces inside, but the colours and patterns still show up well. We swapped them around until we were happy that the frames matched the contents.
Some finishing touches on a couple of them and they were done!
I think this one still needs something, maybe some stars?
Jellyfish?
I love the little tail in the top right of mine, like there's some kind of creature in the picture.
As it turned out it did take the three of us to do the large piece of glass, using exactly the same technique.
We all stepped back from those flames in a hurry!
It was harder to swirl the colours, but the final look was very effective.
I don't think I need another hobby, but this was a lot of fun!
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