Alcohol Ink on Wooden Ornaments


If you follow the blog, you may remember a few weeks ago I posted about buying a stash of these wood ornament blanks on Amazon. I started by spray painting those and then using plastic wrap and alcohol ink to decorate them. While I was preparing those with spray paint, I made a bunch of extras. I spray painted some silver and even sealed a few with acrylic sealer so they would still be wood colored.


I laid them out in cardboard boxes and sprayed one side and let it dry and then flipped them over and painted the other. The acrylic sealed ones I sprayed just one side on because I wasn't sure that the sealer would be enough to allow me to ink the wood. I didn't even get a picture of them because they were an experiment (that and it's the holiday season and everything is a bit rushed).


I started out with the white sprayed ornaments. I laid out a craft mat (actually two because the canned air sprays ink everywhere if you're not careful) and dug out my canned air. I used a light green (Limeade) first. I dripped some ink on the ornament and blew it around with the air.


Then I added some bright blue (Sailboat) and blew it around with the air.


Next I added a color that's new to my collection. It's Blue-Violet from Pinata's new set of alcohol inks. It's a really pretty deep bluish purple. The Pinata inks don't spread out as much when blowing them with air, so you have to keep that in mind when working on canned air projects. 


I added a little pink (Wild Plum) and mixed some Rainforest Green with the Limeade to get some darker green areas.


Then I tried a traditional Christmas colored ornament. Red and green are super tricky since when they mix they turn brown, but I was fairly satisfied with my green and red on this ornament. I used two shades of green, two shades of red and some metallic ink to round it out.


The white painted ornaments worked the best out of all of my samples. But the pink and red ornaments were from the acrylic sealed batch. They worked too, and I look forward to trying that out more. The silver painted ornaments didn't work out very well. There were places where the ink didn't want to stick to the paint at all, so it took a bit of trial and error to cover those and get something that looked halfway decent. When I was satisfied with the ink, I flipped them over and repeated the process. Then I let them dry a day before I sprayed them with some Kamar Varnish to seal them.


These were a ton of fun and I can't wait to come up with new ways to use those ornament blanks in the years to come!

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