First Impressions: T-rex Alcohol Ink Warm and Cool Tone Sets


Several months ago, I bought the Warm and Cool Tone T-Rex Alcohol Ink sets after I had the joy of trying out the base set. They were lovely, so I was excited to try more. After several months of the sealed boxes sitting with my other alcohol inks, I finally got a chance to take them out and see if they were as nice as the base set.


I got out the inks, a craft mat, some 4 inch ceramic tiles, a hand bulb blower, and some 90% rubbing alcohol.


Each set comes with 12 inks (11 colors and 1 metallic ink). The Warm Tone set has a lot of browns, so I'll probably use the Cool Tone set more, but there's some nice pinks and reds in the warm set, too. Just like with the base set, the colored lids are not a good match to the colors in the bottles, but there's a photo on the top of the box that's fairly accurate for each color.


As is tradition when testing new inks, I dripped one drop of an aqua colored ink from the set and see how it moves without any blending solution or air. As you can see, it moves a little, but not much. The color was very saturated--nearly opaque--when not thinned.


The ink moved beautifully once I added some rubbing alcohol. The base set does come with a clear blending solution, but the warm and cool tone sets do not, so I used rubbing alcohol instead so that folks who may not have the base set can see how it works.


I tried out a few more colors on the tile and the inks behaved much like the base set did. The thickness of the ink is fairly similar to other premium alcohol ink brands (Ranger, Pinata, etc...), but it's more saturated than most of the Ranger inks and not quite as saturated as most of Pinata's--but close. All of the blues and teals and greens I tried were beautiful colors.


Next up, I tried some of the shades from the Warm Tone set. There was no aqua for me to test out, so I jumped straight to combining colors and blowing them around. The red was a nice nearly true shade of red (a bit maroon), and the bright orange was a great addition to the oranges and reds in the base set.


I was a little unimpressed by their two shades of pink in the warm set. They are both pastel--which is much different than most of their other inks. But, since pale pink is a desirable color, the saturation didn't bother me, but the colors within the pink were a bit odd. They both came off as almost blue in places. So be aware there are multiple shades in the pinks. They both mix beautifully with the other colors, but on their own, I wasn't terribly impressed.


Next up, I had to try to use the new metallic inks. I took the opportunity to test more of the colors and then added the silver (after a good shake). I tried mixing it with the other colors and thinning it with rubbing alcohol. The silver was ok. It was better than the Ranger silver (which is kind of terrible), but it didn't move nice like the Pinata metallic inks do.


Next up, I tried out all the shades of burnt orange and brown with the gold ink. The gold ink is a bit of a dud. It didn't move well and only looked good when mixed with the darkest of inks. After giving up on the tile, I had the thought that the gold might work better with the T-Rex blender. It was marginally better using their brand of blender over rubbing alcohol, but if you were hoping to find a metallic that rivaled Pinata's, sadly, this isn't it. This set had a ton of browns. I don't ink with brown a lot, so I'm not sure how much I'll use those. There's good diversity in the shades of brown and all the colors are nice and saturated.


So the final verdict. These are nice inks. I was pretty sure they would be. The base set is lovely, and these add more color options. I'd recommend the cool set in a heartbeat. The warm set, maybe less so (except it does have that nice red). The metallic inks were not as good as their colors, so I'm sure I'll be sticking to the Pinata inks for those. And I didn't love their pinks on their own, but these inks are so deeply saturated without being thick that they are a ton of fun to work with.

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