 In this video, I'm going to be covering all the things one might want to use, at least for my techniques in alcohol inks. This is part of the My Virtual Studios class, and it has lessons on lots of different art supplies that are in my studio. I cover my surface with freezer paper, and the freezer paper has two sides. I use the shiny side. It's an easy cleanup to wipe it down as well as when you've used it a bunch and it starts to stain. You can just toss it away, and it's nice and big as well, so it covers my desk and keeps things protected. I have three sets of inks, and there are more inks out there and more colors. I don't have full collections of anything, but these not-way ones, I'm not going to use a whole lot right here in this video or in some of the classes that I'll be teaching. They're just not as pigmented as many other types of alcohol inks. They're less expensive significantly. So if you want to get started, they're a reasonable thing to use, but there are some colors that have a label that says one color, and the color that's actually in the bottle is a different one. I don't know if I got a bum set or whatever, but it is what it is. They're a little smaller bottles than the others, and when I say they're less expensive, I measured by milliliter to figure out that these are about 10 cents per milliliter cheaper than these other two brands. So the other two that I'm going to mostly focus on are the Ranger and Pinata. Quality-wise, I find they're both about the same. Price-wise, they're in the same range as each other. It depends on how many you buy at a time. In the set on the right, the Pinatas, I have my Pinatas in with my Lumiere, so ignore the Lumiere's. They're not alcohol inks. And then in the Ranger collections that I have, I also have my old Adirondacks. That's what the Ranger used to have before they had these that just say Ranger on them, that alcohol inks. The nibs on these two sets are different, but I don't find that that matters very much in the application of the color. But if you like one nib or the other, then you can choose that. To make the labels for the tops of the bottles so that I could see them readily in their containers, I took a piece of B Creative Tape, and before peeling off the backing, I punched holes out of them just a regular old office hole punch and then stuck the little pieces on top of each of the bottles. And then I could just take the bottle nib and pour a little bit of that color, just a tiny drop is enough, onto the top so that I would have ready access to all those colors and be able to see the whole collection and know what I was grabbing since when I'm looking at the top of them, I can't see the label and know what color they are. So I did that for both of these sets. Next up, I want to talk about papers because what paper you choose will determine what techniques you can do. There are some techniques that aren't going to work on particular papers and I will demo them. This is photo paper. It has a shiny side and a not shiny side. Mine has logos on one side. That's the side I actually want to use. So I'll talk about that a little further. Ranger has some glossy alcohol ink cardstock. There is Yupo and whether it comes with the old packaging or the newer packaging, there's a heavy, a medium, there's a translucent. Lots of different types of Yupo comes in lots of different size of pads. These little ones I used for my swatching because I thought they were cute. And then I realized I wasn't going to use the translucent ones. So I did that for swatching. I found this tree free watercolor paper and Terra Slate. I found both of those online and thought I would try them out for this as well and I'll demo them. Now let's talk about blowy things. I've had a lot of people asking what am I using? What is the Copic Airbrush setup and how does that work? And are there any alternatives since the Copic Airbrush system is a little on the pricey side? It's hooked to a compressor on the floor and the compressor can be expensive. The Copic Airbrush can be expensive. I did find this other little airbrush and it's meant to be used with inks in that little container at the top. You turn it on, you press the button and the water, whatever is in that little cup comes out or you can just use it for air which is what I'll be using with the alcohol inks. I'm not putting the alcohol in those little cups. And it's a USB plug-in by the way. Next up is the blower tool from Ranger and I will demonstrate how that works and the comparison between that and the effects that you can get using other ways of moving the alcohol ink. And next up is a can of air. I've had many people recommend this and I'm going to show you what it does and what works and doesn't work with that. And then finally a straw and I'm using a Bipple straw. A Bipple is just one with a little bendy in it because that works a little easier to guide where the air goes. And next up I'm going to talk about blending solutions. There's an alcohol blending solution from Ranger. It has some stuff in it that you need to be careful of. It can be dangerous if you inhale it so if you use a straw do not use this solution. You might inhale some because you're down there with your face right close to it so be really careful if you use that. I recommend using instead isopropyl alcohol and you can use either 91 or 99. I found the 91 at my local like drugstore type place and the 99 I actually had to get on Amazon but you can use the 91% just fine, totally easy. And I put mine into a little glass jar because I want to be able to have ready access to it, not this giant bottle. I also put a little label on the top because I want to make sure that I keep that separate from my bottle of bleach since they both look the same. And I just put a little picture on top of you know what kind of thing I would use it for and I use a little pipette for applying the alcohol onto my project. The last thing I want to show you supply wise is the application process. You can either put down a puddle of the alcohol and then drop the color in. You can put the color down first or you can even apply it using this tool and put the little foam pads on it. And then when you put the ink on the pad you can pounce it onto your project. Now that I've shown you the products which are all of course listed in the doobly-doo and over on the blog and in the classroom and everywhere else. I want to show you some demos of how a bunch of these different things work together. And in this first section I'm leaving this sound on so you can hear the difference between how the different air mover tools work and how they sound. Because I've had a lot of people say airbrush is too loud for them so you can get a bit of a comparison here. I'm going to start with the easy cheapest one which is a straw and a lot of people use a straw with alcohol inks. You can do some things with them and you can move the color some. The Bipple you can see allows you to bend it and target a little bit in different ways. I am not as full of hot air as people think I am because I find it difficult to do this. Things just don't move very much. The can of air I found awkward as well. And maybe it's just the can that I got but it came out in bursts and it also spit out some sort of a weird liquid. I don't really know what that is. Maybe it's freon or something from inside the bottle. You can certainly try a can of air that you've got but mine just dripped all over the place and did weird things. So there's that. Then I decided I would try out the next one up the line which is the Ranger Blower. And this one I found awkward. For people who have arthritis this is going to be a real problem for you. And it just does little short bursts. It doesn't do a long burst. It's going to get the technique that I like to use to get very long, flowy, consistent lines. And things that are going to make a beautiful design. But they can do little short things. This little tiny airbrush you press the button and the motor stays on the whole time. And then you can press the little button to move the color. I can get some longer strokes with this and get some movement of it. You can see it's not super consistent and super blowy but it works. It's just a lower PSI. And these are about 50 bucks or thereabouts. The cool thing about this is that you can put other inks. I wouldn't do it with alcohol inks but you can put other inks into the container at the top and use it for other kinds of airbrushing which is probably something that I will do. But just know that it doesn't have a huge PSI or pounds per square inch is I think what that means. And it just isn't going to give you a lot of pressure. But now I want to show you the Copic airbrush system. And this one has a really good PSI because it runs on the compressor. And that's going to give a lot of push to this so that I can get big long wide strokes. So if you're trying to get this and haven't been able to figure out why a straw doesn't give you this look, that's why. Because you need enough air pressure to really move the color and to push it around. And you can just keep adding liquid to it and move this stuff around, have as much fun as you want with it. And with the compressor you can use this for a long time without ever running out of battery power or anything because it just stays plugged in. I want to share a little bit about hairdryers before we leave this section. You may have a hairdryer at home that you want to try. This one has a cool setting and a blue cool button that you have to hold down in order to keep that cool air flowing. But this one at least gets cool enough I can put my hand in front of it and not melt anything. Not hurt myself. It does not melt you Poe which is great. But it's really, really noisy. It's also huge so it's in my vision when I'm trying to work with it. And it puts out a wind tunnel of air. It does have air pressure the way the Copic airbrush has but it puts it out in a wider swath which means I don't have any control over it. It's just a very large wide area and you need to use a lot more of the alcohol when you're using something that puts out this much air because it needs to have that much to keep it moistened because it dries quickly. But once you do put enough alcohol in it, yes you can move it, you can get that ethereal look. I just don't find that the noise is a good enough trade off for me because that's just really distracting to me. There's another hairdryer I've seen recommended by other alcohol artists and I didn't like this one one bit. It has a roller brush on the end. I didn't even like that for my hair. It has two settings, a low and a high. And both of them are really warm. The high warps Yupo paper. The low does not warp Yupo paper so that's at least good. But the low doesn't hardly move anything at all. It moves very, very slightly. The higher setting will move it in a better way but then you start heating up your workspace. And I started cooking really fast because this was just way too hot for me. In my class I am going to be talking about the blower and using a straw for some techniques. But in general if you can at all afford the Copic airbrush has my highest recommendation or the handheld airbrush which runs about 50 bucks, then I think you're going to be more satisfied with your results because they're going to give you a better look. Now I want to do some paper tests. And I'm going to try to do the same basic thing with each one of them. This is the Ranger Blossy Cardstock. And when I start on the front side of it, which is the side I believe you're supposed to use, and start pushing the color around, I got little weird lines of course. That's just one of those things you get when you start blowing on this. And I was trying to see if I could move those edges, if I could soften them. And if I could get them to flow the way that I did on the freezer paper. And they're not really flowing. There are lines that will not move. I would have at one time said that those little hard lines that aren't moving, that those are staining the paper. I would call that a staining process. And with some colors they will stain a paper literally. I mean that's just what the color does. This, I will have to tell you, after all this testing is because of the paper itself. Now the back side of this, hot mess, don't use the back side of this one. Because that did not work at all. It looked terrible. But I was not a fan of what this did on this glossy cardstock. But let me show you why, because I'm going to show you the other papers and how they have acted more, I guess, artistically for me and the technique that I like to use. And you can see how easily this freezer paper cleans up. So now I'm going to try the photo paper. We're going to start with the front. And I'm going to do the same thing, just blow it before I put any alcohol on it just to see if I can get some hard lines there. And then see if I can move them. Does it move the hard lines or do the hard edges remain? And some of that does move. Not a ton of it, not all of it. But I can get some of it to move. And I could sit here and play with it for a while and maybe get more of it to move. But there are things here that will also stain. They're going to stay in place and you'll end up with those hard edges. But look at what happens when I do the back side, even though it has those little HP logos on them. If I'm going to cover the whole thing with color, it's not going to matter. I can strategically drop some color on top of some of those areas to cover it. But look at how much movement I can get on the back side as opposed to the front side. And so I can move these. I can soften out those edges until they get to the very edge. I can keep reworking it. And this will just keep moving on the back side of the photo paper. I had used photo paper before when I first started using alcohol inks forever ago. And the way I tell you, I tickled to know that my unhappiness with the front side was just with the front side. Now I have all this great paper that I can use to play around with and make all these beautiful designs. So even after it got all completely dried and I was able to touch it, then I can still go back in and rework it where on the other side there were just some areas that were frozen in place. They had stained the paper as it was and they weren't going to come up. But this I can get a lot of different looks because I can keep reworking it. So next let's try a piece of U-Po. This is just white U-Po. There's white and there's translucent. I don't recommend the translucent because I haven't figured out why one would want translucent because it's kind of partially see-through but not see-through enough to make a difference. But there's that. And the U-Po works very much like the backside of the HP Photo Paper. I can make some hard edges with it, you know, dry it as much as I can, trying to get all that liquid out of there so that I have an apples-to-apples test with everything else and have some nice sharp edges that are dry. And then when I add more of the alcohol in it, I can see whether or not that is going to move the color just by dropping it in there with the pipette and watch the beauty of that edge. And then it just disappears, it just melts. And there are some edges that are going to sometimes be a little harder and, you know, when I teach classes and do videos and stuff, I'll explain more about that. But you can see with this I have lots of flexibility and the chance to keep changing things and keep reworking things to make it look like I want to, as opposed to some of the others where the color gets stuck where it is and you end up with what you end up with as opposed to the ability to turn it into something more ethereal and more beautiful. So the U-Po Paper is a big thumbs up, more expensive, of course, than the Photo Paper, but it is gorgeous nonetheless. Sometimes colors look a little different on U-Po than they do on the Photo Paper and that's just a matter of testing out your colors. Now this one was a new paper to me. It was called Tree Free, which of course all of it is. It's plastic paper. These are synthetic papers that we're working on. This will not work in general on anything that is not a plastic type of paper. But I'm going to do the same test, just put a blob down and start to dry it and try to get some edges to see if those are going to be movable and just push the color around. This whole process of even testing things is fun because I just love watching the way that the color moves or doesn't on each of these different papers. Here I'm moving the color and you can see that it kind of moves things. There's a few spots where it just wants to stay though. There are just some places where it's not going to go and even if I put in extra alcohol, let it sit for a second to try to work it out. It will soften some so I can get some of it to move but there are some hard edges in there that just are not relaxing. They're not loosening up. It is possible that you could take that and really force that to move by just continually putting more and more alcohol on it but I don't find that to be something that I really want to have to do. I'd rather have a paper that's going to work really well. So that one was a big no. And then there is the Terra Slate paper. Again, this is a paper that I didn't know about. I bought some just to see and it works really well too. It works very much like Yupo. It comes up in an Amazon search when you're looking for Yupo. That was how I found these other papers and it was nice to be able to find them. Price comparison between them all. I will have in the supply list at least approximate price comparison at the time that this video is made. So that may not last forever. So you can check them out yourself but this paper seems to work very well. Now the other paper, the one that I just did that didn't work so great, these are great papers for things like pen and ink as long as you don't lean on it because it'll take some time to dry but they're very smooth paper. So there's other things I can do with them just not necessarily alcohol ink. So make sure you always think about what else you can use a paper for when you get it. But look how nicely the color just melts out when you put alcohol on it. Those edges just totally disappear and soften so that you can blend them into a nice ethereal background. And I could play with these things forever. I can just keep doing this and doing this and doing this but we are going to move on instead. How about that? Because we can't play forever. We must end this at some point. Let's talk about swatching. I'm not always a big swatcher but on something like this I would definitely recommend it so you know what color is going to come out of the bottle when you start doing some work. And these are the Nodway ones. Remember those little bottles that I showed you at the beginning. You can see they do work. They make beautiful shapes. You can do beautiful technique work with them. But some of the colors are weird. This coral has an orangey look to it. It's very pale. I tried adding more color to it and I got weird sticky edges. So that's one of the odd colors. And there's a few odd ones in here but there's lots that are quite beautiful. So if you're looking for some bargain alcohol inks they certainly would work. There just might be some that will be a little bit odd in the whole collection. And I bought one of their grouping collections. A whole big set of inks all at once. There's this one that's supposed to be a pink and I would call that a red as opposed to a pink. This one says it's cyan and I know cyan as a light blue and that came out as a green. And that one is supposed to be gray. The one on the right. I don't quite think that that's gray but whatever. So that was the Nodway colors. What I did with the rest of them was something a little more consistent, a little more hefty. I took each one of those little ones and I made the swatches off of the transparent ones. And I tucked them inside these cards because I'm going to take pictures of the swatch as well as the card. The card was done on the photo paper. The swatch is done on the transparent UPO. And with those, since it's transparent, I had to have something behind it that was white. So I just took a little piece of I think it was computer paper and trimmed it down and adhered them just so I'd have some white behind it in my swatch page. And this one is an Adirondack ink. Some of the Adirondacks have multiple colors to them. You can see there's kind of different colors on the swatch than there were on the card. And that's why it helps to swatch them or try them on different things. I did my swatching on UPO and these card samples I did on the photo paper. So on my blog and over in the classroom in my virtual studio class, you'll see the set of pictures of each one of these so you can see how it works on the two different papers. And I didn't, of course, swatch it on everything but look at the beautiful shapes that you can practice in making these. And these are all one color card backgrounds that I made and I haven't added sentiments to them yet but I can do that as I'm sending them out to people depending on what kind of sentiment I want on it. And it gave me a lot of chances to practice different techniques and different looks for a particular ink and how can I make it move? What if I squeeze the pigment down first and the alcohol later versus the alcohol first or the solution first and then the pigment and just playing around with a lot of different things to see what kind of shapes I could get. The alcohol inks have a lot of color in those little bottles. It's not like you're going to use them up if you start making a bunch of card backgrounds like this and if you're making large pieces you can make a lot of really large things out of these little bottles. There are a lot of bang for the buck in terms of a product but to get this ethereal look the big expense is going to be in deciding which of the blowing tools that you're going to want to use because as you saw in the demo there's just a vast difference between the amount of pressure you get to push the color and make these kinds of soft lines and soft glazes of color and to get the movement that I get in some of these requires a little more of that pressure but I'll let you make the choices about what you would like to get for yourself for this kind of painting. This is the swatch book that I have and I just put them in plastic pages and put them in rough color order. All of my brands are mixed up here so that I have them all together and you can see some of the colors have multiple colors within them. Those two that I was just pointing to are Ranger but they're Adirondack Rangers so they're the older versions of those colors and I don't even know if they're available anymore because they're very old bottles from many years ago but you can see some of the other colors too from both of the other brands have multiple colors within them. They don't all have that but some of them do and having swatches like this will tell you a little bit about that. Now these two one is the Ranger the newer version the other is the older Adirondack version of Wild Plum I find the new one to be very different and those two colors don't necessarily work. One of them might look more like a different kind of purple but having these swatches will tell you that so when you're picking colors and trying to put colors together to use for a multicolor piece you'll have these to refer to and I just do a little splooge of color and then airbrush them out and see what comes. Some of the greens break into really beautiful colors you can see they have blues and greens and yellows that come forward out of them they're just really really interesting and again if you want to look at all the individual swatches to see which individual colors you might be interested in these will all be posted so you can check those out. I do hope that this video has been helpful to you and that you've learned something from it share it with a friend if so. There's an alcohol ink class over on my website if you're interested in learning more about my Ethereal alcohol ink techniques as well as the My Virtual Studio class which is a walkthrough of my studio all the supplies that I have tips for maintaining them and storing them and caring for them and which brands I love etc that I've done for each different kind of medium and that one is a free one. Thank you so much for joining me be sure to click the like button subscribe if you have not yet and I will see you again very soon.