 Hello there, it is Sandy Alnock here with some alcoholic ink playtime. And I have been just playing with my alcohol inks of late. I spent a couple of days with my desk all covered with freezer paper so I could just play to my heart's content and have lots of room to make messes. Freezer paper wipes off really nicely with your alcohol so you can clean it up and just keep using the same piece and that sort of thing so you can also test colors if you need to out on that paper. I was trying to make a bouquet. I'm trying to figure out different techniques for control of alcohol ink. You may know I have two alcohol ink classes. One is ethereal which has more of a soft floral flowing kind of a look and the other one is more textures so I called it terrestrial to counter the ethereal and in this one I'm going to combine some of that and trying to invent something new as well. I don't know. I have no idea if there's going to be another class in the alcohol ink space just because I don't really know if I have other things that I can do and that's what I'm playing with. A lot of times when I start trying to play with a medium that's when I get ideas for oh I could do this, I could do that, I could do the other and I come up with a list of either five or ten lessons that I can put into a class but I am just at the beginning of that so I have no idea if this will turn into anything or not but for the time being I'm going to be making a vase of flowers. The picture that I was looking at I just pulled up a bunch of different types of floral vases mostly because I wanted to get an idea of different flower shapes and see if I could create different flower shapes and the picture I was looking at looks nothing like what this came out with but this is where I started because I wanted to make a lilac vase so they had these pinks and purples in the lilacs and then there was also some baby's breath in there that was mixed in with green and there were a few leaves in the bouquet so I was pleased with getting the colors in the right areas. I'm using a Copic airbrush to move the color and the Copic airbrush is connected to a compressor which has really strong power so it can really spludge the color from all different places. You can also lift it way high up off the paper to dry it so you can dry without moving the color by just like holding the air away and letting it blow to dry the the liquid that's on the surface of the paper and I tend to like it the most rather than using the other blowing tools. It's I know more expensive and requires having a compressor. Lots of people don't like having a compressor around etc but I do like mine and I use it all the time with Copic markers and the like as well. The paper that I'm using this time is NARA N-A-R-A. They're a company I think from India, not sure. They have a whole bunch of different kinds of papers they have different sizes they have round papers lots of different fun things and you can look them up online. I follow them on Instagram and they have lots of things that they repost from lots of fine artists who use alcohol inks so I'm starting to see more than just like hey let's blob some color on here which is what most of us do and it is beautiful to blob color on there absolutely but I'm trying to see if I can make things that are more representational. There's not a lot of people who do anything representational because of the nature of the medium as you may know if you've tried it before but here I'm trying to see if I could paint with believe it or not a piece of paper towel. I wanted to try to see if I could make a vase could I do that and depending on the paper that you're using and the colors that you're using you can wipe off some color and that's what I'm doing here as well to carve out the shape of a vase and putting in some of the alcohol in it. I did get some lines when I was making the vase and that was a little bit weird because I wanted it to feel as flowy as the flowers I didn't want it to feel like it was out of character. It's one of the reasons why I haven't run right to my Copic markers to make lines because that feels like it's a different medium and I want to see if I can make alcohol itself and the alcohol inks themselves the thing that does the drawing parts so even though I'm going back and forth and fussing with this a whole lot you'll see at the end you can decide if you thought it was worth all the fussing but knowing that I could wipe off some of that color was really helpful so I could put in an excess in a particular area I could move it around I wanted to let some of it flow just so I would have some areas that were loose like the flowers as I said I wanted to wanted it to feel organic and feel like it was made with just the flowing inks instead of something else to make it happen so I gave up on that for a little bit I'll come back to the base of the vase later but I did know that I wanted to put more leaves and flowers in this bottom area so that they would start to cascade out of the vase and cover up that weird top that I made so just added little leaves and just kept moving the color around once I had the base color down though and I still had that all those teeny tiny lilac flowers in my brain I had a way that I was planning on trying to make that happen that didn't work but something else happened so it's all good but I wanted to put the detailed sections on top of what I already had down this is my first pass I think of this like with watercolor I put down a looser pass of color first and then add in the details so I made myself a little window to peek through so that I could put some spray of alcohol right into certain areas and just do a little bit of spray and this was going to ha ha ha turn into an area with lots of teeny tiny detail lots of little itty bitty flowers that didn't exactly turn out all I wanted it to I could have found other ways to apply little dots I mean I could take a colorless blender and put them in there I could do all sorts of different stuff but I just wanted to see if I could make this idea work where I was creating tiny dots using my little mask my little my little circle mask because I thought it warranted a little more exploration but as I added more colors one of the things you'll notice as well if you've studied my in my classes I talk about color theory and in my alcoholic classes too I specifically talk about being careful not to make mud by mixing red yellow and blue together they make brown and you'll see some brown start to appear in this because I have red yellow and blue now you don't see any yellow right there I have my yellow jar out but I didn't use it the yellow is in the green the yellow and the blue are inside the green which means when the pink color mixes with it it's going to make a brown I'm also adding a dark red in here and I will figure out what these colors were and list them in the description if I can remember what they are by the time I'm actually making this voiceover I kind of put everything away so I'm hoping I can figure out what what colors they were but anyway I did add a darker red because I wanted a little more contrast you know me and contrast and then started trying to spray it a little to get a just a little more texture into it and lighten it up so putting that that little tiny bit of alcohol in there helps to make it movable and then I can even blow some of the color around and I started getting nice edges on a few of the flowers that kind of thing I wasn't worried anymore at this point about trying to make it look like the lilacs I gave up on that but I was enjoying the looseness of the bouquet itself and the fact that I had light colors and dark colors and things that almost look like flower shapes these don't look like any flowers I would recognize if I knew what breed they would be what kind of flowers but they're pretty and they're pink so there you go now when you put alcohol down and you don't have anything else around it you can see there's like little chunky outlines on the outsides of these and the air that I'm pushing with since it's strong with the air compressor makes little lines coming out from it there's lots of different things that you can do using a feature like those lines so stay tuned for more because I have more ideas that I'm cooking around in my brain you'll see another one during World Watercolor Month so I will be doing a water scene but there's lots of fun interesting things that you can do with alcohol inks that doesn't entail just blowing color right across the surface but can be representational and that is kind of what I'm trying for to see if I can make that happen then there's one area as I was looking at my finished vase that just wasn't looking soft I wanted one more little spritz or something in that section so added some of the alcohol to it and then did a little bit of spraying and that little end made me much happier than it was previous to that so I ended up with a blossom down there but every time you start with one blossom you potentially wreck another so at some point you have to stop and I stopped so there you go thank you so much for joining me for playtime hope you take some time to play with whatever medium you love to use tag me on Instagram if you end up doing a floral vase like this I want to see what your results are if you achieve anything better than I did and I'll see you again soon take care bye