Plastic Wrap Alcohol ink on Spray Painted Candles

A couple weeks ago I tested out some new (to me) alcohol inks: Unicone Arts Alcohol Ink. My opinion of the inks was a bit mixed. The inks were beautiful colors, but a bit thin and really inconsistent in vibrancy/opacity (how strong the colors are). So, I wanted to try them out using some different methods to see how well they really work.

I've done a lot of plastic wrap alcohol inking over the last few years, but when I first started to try applying alcohol ink with plastic wrap, I had a few sort of successful attempts at applying it with the plastic wrap and peeling it off while still wet or tacky. Since then, I've mastered the art of letting it dry (it can be a real challenge of patience some days). Dollar Tree Altar Candles were one of the projects I tried inking with plastic wrap with mixed success, so I thought I'd try it again. 

This time, I spray painted the candle jars with a light coat of white spray paint. I taped off the top of the candle jar, and I sprayed around the candles twice, and let it dry for about an hour. I had planned to do another coat, but the spray paint clogged up, and I just couldn't get any more paint out of the can. So why spray paint the jars and not just ink directly on them? Well, the plastic wrap method works a bit better on slightly porous surfaces. The ink sinks in instead of sliding around on the surface.

After the spray paint was dry to the touch, I brought it inside to finish drying overnight. The next day, I laid out two sheets of plastic wrap large enough to wrap around the candles. I laid them on top of two craft mats and got out my Unicone inks to try them again.

I selected colors that I thought would look bright and wouldn't turn brown if they mixed together a bit. Then I dripped ink onto the plastic wrap sheets. I alternated between the two sheets of plastic wrap so the candles would be a matching set. I ended up using 5 colors. They were still lovely shades, but they were quite thin, and it was really easy to drip several drops on the plastic wrap by accident.

I set the candles on the middle of each sheet of ink covered plastic wrap and wrapped the plastic wrap around the candle jar. Immediately I could tell the magenta ink was overtaking the other colors, but I was optimistic that the lovely bright colors would stick around as they dried. I tried to tuck the top and bottoms of the plastic wrap in a bit and rolled the candles over so the seam of the plastic wrap was on top (so they would leak less ink as they dried). Then I left them overnight to dry.

The next day, I was pleasantly surprised by how bright the inks were after they dried, so I was excited to peel the plastic wrap off the candle jars.

As I feared, the magenta ink was extremely dominant, but the candles still turned out well. Spray painting the candle jars had the desired effect of making the glass more opaque and porous so the ink would stick and stand out.

I peeled the painter's tape back to reveal the top of the candle jars to find that quite a bit of ink had seeped under. I was more worried about the paint going everywhere than I was about the alcohol ink and the painter's tape did it's job with the paint.

I used some cotton swabs and some rubbing alcohol to clean the alcohol ink off the top edges of the candle jars.

So, I'm still not entirely sold on the Unicone inks, but they sure are pretty colors. I count this experiment as a success! I'll probably let these dry a few more days before sealing and enjoying them!