Alcohol Ink Galaxy Tile


Months ago, I cut a bunch of shapes out of some dark blue vinyl with my Silhouette cutting machine. I made some monograms for our electric toothbrushes and some meeple coasters, but I still had a Tardis (Dr. Who's time machine) cut out and waiting for a project, so I decided to put it on a ceramic tile and try to do some galaxy alcohol ink. I have played around with galaxy spray paint and had a lot of fun, but I hadn't tried to make space-y nebula-y alcohol ink patterns.


So I got out my craft mats, alcohol inks, a six inch ceramic tile, my Tardis vinyl decal, and some canned air.


I weeded (peeled the excess vinyl off) my decal and set it aside and located my space-y colors (pitch black, indigo, purple twilight, a couple other shades of blue and some silver and gold).


I started with the metallic inks in the center of the tile so they would show behind the vinyl decal. I squirted some ink onto the tile and thinned it a bit with rubbing alcohol (using a mister bottle) and then used canned air to spread it out.


I added more silver and rubbing alcohol until the metallic ink covered all of the center of the tile. The Ranger metallics are pretty opaque and don't spread too easily, so it was almost like silver paint on the tile, so it provided excellent coverage.


Then I started swirling my space colors around the edges and blowing them out. To start, I used the pitch black and the purple to get some good coverage. Then I added the indigo to get the dark shimmery blue in the mix.


After I had good coverage with the colors, I started adding a bit of silver and some of the Pinata white and some splashes of rubbing alcohol to create star-like patterns


When I had most of the tile covered except a Tardis-sized void--I let the design dry, and then I used some wide painter's tape as transfer tape on the decal.


I carefully applied the decal onto the tile and used the back of my thumb nail to burnish the design and make sure it stuck to the tile.


I peeled back the painter's tape slowly to make sure that all parts of the decal were sticking to the tile. It was a pretty simple decal, so there were no problems. I should have left the ink to cure for about a day or so, though, as a bit of ink peeled up along the edges of the tape (the ink is just a bit more speckled after peeling the tape off). A few of those speckles would have just looked like stars, but with a line of them, I opted to do a bit of touch up with some ink over those areas.


When I was all done, I had a conquered my first galaxy alcohol ink pattern! Between the metallic inks and the indigo inks shimmery nature, this tile is really amazing when it has sunlight shining on it. The pictures don't quite show the full range of iridescent color, so I'm really pleased with how it turned out and I can't wait to make more galaxy tiles!

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