Unicone Alcohol Ink: First Impressions

There are so many new brands of alcohol ink coming on the market that I've started doing these first impressions reviews of the inks as I manage to try them out. This brand--Unicone (not Unicorn--though they use a Unicorn in their logo)--was on a lightning deal on Amazon for $9.99. Since they usually sell for around $20.00, I figured it would be worth checking them out. Unicone mainly sells resin and resin supplies, so these inks were probably designed to be used with their resin. I will not be using these inks with resin (at least not in the immediate future), so let's see how they do.

The inks arrived in a pretty box with lovely colors on the lid and their unicorn logo on the front. I got out some basic alcohol inking supplies (craft mat, rubbing alcohol, pipette, hand blower, ceramic tile, etc.) and got to work.

When I opened the box, the bottles reminded me a lot of the T-Rex ink bottles. They were a nice size and easy to work with, but don't fit in my existing alcohol ink storage (unlike the Pinata, Pixiss, and Ranger ink bottles which are all roughly the same size).

The set comes with 12 colors. There's no black, white, metallic ink, or blending solution in the set--it's just colorful ink. The bottles have numbers on them instead of the color names and colored lids. They do send a chart along that matches the color number to a name, but I was suspicious of the colored caps (they are rarely a good match). 

As has been tradition with my first impression reviews, I selected the aqua green color (they call it Tropical) and did a single drop to see what kind of thickness and saturation the ink had. For this particular color, it had very little of either. It immediately spread out into a circle and only moved a little bit when I tilted the tile.

Then I used a drop or two of rubbing alcohol and a drop of blending solution to move the inks around (with the hand bulb blower) and see how they behaved. This color was very thin and became super wispy and pastel in color as it was moved around the tile.

So I started adding additional colors to my tile and blowing them around. The purple (Orchid) was a lovely light shade of purple, then I dripped on the darker blue ink--that they call Cobalt--and woah, it was like it was a completely different ink. This color was super saturated and a bit thicker than the other two. It completely took over the corner that it was dropped on.

As I continued to add color to my tile, I noticed that the inks were drastically different in their saturation levels. The Cobalt blue and Raspberry magenta were both quite saturated and a bit thicker than the other inks. Some of the inks were sort of in between in saturation and some of them were quite light (like the Tropical and Orchid purple). This difference in saturation, made it a bit difficult to use the inks together--the more saturated/darker inks took over, and it was hard to pick out the lighter colors.

I might have slightly over inked the tile as I was curious to see what each color of ink would be like and used all 12 in my rainbow splatter, but I kind of like how it turned out.

To test how it stamped, I used a felt applicator and dripped some colors on with a drop or two of rubbing alcohol for initial coverage. Then I came back over the tile with inks that weren't thinned and kept stamping until the ink got tacky and circles formed. The inks stamped fairly well, but again, the lighter colors got lost. I tried to create sort of a wildflower garden look with the green and magenta (which mixed to more of a purple). The shades of yellow and blue got almost completely overtaken by the green and magenta.

In the end the inks worked pretty well. I was satisfied by my results on both the stamped tile and the splattered tile. The colors are really lovely. Each time I dripped a new ink on the tile, I caught myself saying--oh that's a nice green or oh that's a nice purple, etc...The set doesn't really have a true orange as it has a orange-y yellow and a red orange, but nothing in the middle. The red is also more of a watermelon shade (they call it Cherry) than true red. But it's a really nice set of colors.

Bottom line: I'd say these inks are pretty good. The colors are lovely, the price (even at $20) is good (and is great when it goes on sale for less), but be prepared for significant differences in saturation levels and a thinner ink than Ranger and T-Rex (and a lot thinner than Pinata...but a bit thicker than Pixiss). I look forward to trying these out on some different projects to see how they do.