Alcohol Ink on Glossy Cardstock


As anyone who frequents this blog knows, I like alcohol inks. What you may or may not have figured out yet is that I'm also terribly cheap. It's why I made my own ink applicator instead of forking out  5 or 6 bucks for one. Needless to say, I wasn't about to spend $7 on a pack of 10 sheets of paper for the Ranger brand glossy cardstock. And I certainly wasn't going to spend the $14 for 10 sheets of Yupo (which is plasticized paper and works even better than glossy cardstock...or so I've been told as I'm too cheap to buy it). So when I noticed you could buy a package of 250 sheets of Xerox's brand of glossy cardstock for about $12 I figured that was a deal I could get behind. Heck, even if it doesn't work perfectly for alcohol ink, I can still use it in my printer.


So I grabbed my inking supplies: a craft mat, my applicator and felt, and several colors of Ranger alcohol ink and tried just stamping a pattern onto the paper.


Much like the surfaces on the white gift bags I inked last month, the ink soaks in fairly quickly. I wasn't able to cover the whole surface with my initial inked felt. As you can see above, it faded out as I moved along the sheet of paper.


So I used the same felt and added drops of similar, but different colors so I could layer them over the top of each other. I simply stamped from the side of the page that had very little ink and worked my way back to the other side. It worked out pretty well to create a sort of confetti look.


Next, I tried using a water brush filled with some rubbing alcohol and a plastic palette to do some painting. This worked out perfectly. The ink soaks in enough that it doesn't smear. It actually works better than the times I've tried using the water brush on ceramic tile. That being said, it's not a very user-friendly painting medium since it does soak in and can't be changed or layered very well. So I created a nice striped pattern. You could do all kinds of neat things with the water brush as long as you planned them out ahead of time.


Lastly, I tried the good old alcohol ink standby, squirt the ink and blow it with canned air. The canned air didn't move the ink much, but the squirts of color turned out nicely on the paper.


I kept squeezing the ink onto the page until I filled it up and created a design. Since I was just playing around with this new paper, I think these turned out pretty well. I have a better idea of what I can do on this paper and I look forward to trying out new techniques.


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