 Hi there, it's Sandy Olnock and today I'm going to be doing an alcohol ink painting with an acrylic layover and you'll see how that works out later on at the end of this video and I'll make it all into a clock as you see here. I'm going to be using some Nara paper which comes as round paper, this one is the 12 inch one so it will fit on the clock form that I bought and I'm going to pick out a couple of teal type colors and then two colors to use for the sand and I'm using one that has a little more yellow in it, one that has a little more brown in it, use whatever kinds of colors you've got at home, whatever brand and get started on making one of these because they're way fun to do. You could also do this in a different format, you can do it smaller and try to make it on cards, it's a little bit more difficult because the waves, the way that I make them are going to be a little on the fatter side so it's going to work out better for a larger piece. So I'm going to begin by putting some 99% alcohol onto the paper in the area where I want to have the sand and just squeeze out a couple drops, well maybe more than a couple drops of each of the colors that I'm going to use for the sand and then I'm going to use the gravity method to move the color around. You could certainly use whatever kind of air blowing system that you have, I have a Copic airbrush that I use most of the time when I do my alcohol ink work and I'm going to just roll it around though because I want to try to get a somewhat smooth area for the sand and you know this changes over time when I start working on these pieces I might have a vision for what I want it to look like and then whatever the alcohol ink does is whatever it does but I'm trying to keep the yellow just on one section of this but try to create some sort of a wave edge which means rolling it in such a way that I get a wave but every time I turn it the other direction it tries to make a flat line so you need to be careful as you're doing it. Sometimes when you roll the paper if you roll really fast in one direction it won't cut off that curve as quickly so my little mini tip for you, the paper that I have underneath everything is freezer paper that keeps my desk clean and protected but I also have paper towels under this and for the reason that I want to be able to blow off any excess using my Copic airbrush and try to eliminate having too much color collected on the edge of the piece. I didn't want it to kind of have a big old halo around it and if I have that absorbent paper on the outside it's going to be able to pull that ink off so I don't get too much of a lip of color around there and by the way you may have noticed this is in real time so you're going to see all the steps of the process here. I'm trying to dry it. I want to dry it completely before tackling the water section and I have two alcohol ink classes and some of the techniques in here are ones that I developed for the terrestrial alcohol ink class and in that we do a lot of things where one section is one color one section is another color and in order to get those separations of color you do just as I'm doing here put the color on in just the area that you want it get it to dry completely and then you only have to deal with the place where the two colors meet and you're not rolling the whole paper around all different directions and having your yellow try to escape into the watercolor the blue color. So now I'm going to put some of the alcohol onto the water side and do the very same thing with these two teal colors that I've got one is a little darker than the other and I can just slide them around in the very same way. When it comes to the space that's in between them if you don't want to go through the step of putting on the white paint that I will be doing later on you could be really careful and be able to keep that white edge between the two. I did not do that and partly because I wanted to show you how to recover from that using the white paint but if you're able to it would be extra beautiful if it's got just that nice crisp white outline that nice crisp line there it's not likely to happen I'll just tell you that it's very hard to make that stay because as you see when I roll things around it just starts encroaching little by little onto that white place and eventually the two of them will start to meet you'll get a little bleeding of colors occasionally don't stress out about it if you do because this is alcohol ink it's not supposed to be perfection here it's supposed to be very flowy and freeform so if you as I said have taken my alcoholic glasses you'll know stuff just happens it's just the way this medium is it is a lot of fun to watch the color roll around but it's also a challenge to control it and that's what I tried in both my classes to provide us some tools to control the alcohol ink so that it does a little bit more of what you want as opposed to what it wants because sometimes it just does its own thing completely and you end up with nothing that you were expecting to work out now there are some colors that I have found when I do this gravity technique and I don't know why it is but some of them will get pixelated this one has not but I did have some bleed over from the yellow into the blue and that's not a problem not a problem at all if you do get in one of these big smooth areas any of that little it they almost look like little flakes of color and in some cases that is because of the alcohol solution you're using but other cases I don't know why I did another one of these that you'll see at the end where I I used a blue that's from Ranger it's from a recent purchase it's not an old bottle and yet it provided that little granulation and all I did was add more alcohol and wash that off to start putting in more of the color that did work that didn't have that that feature that weird texture to it but here I'm just blowing the surface of it until I end up with something that I'm happy with but I decided and you know here's where playing too much with the alcohol can really get you in trouble I decided what if I tried to put a wave in right now how would that look so I put some alcohol on and then started trying to dry it and move the color around and then I realized maybe that wasn't going to work maybe I needed more color out there because now it was going to be really light and then as soon as I put more color in it now this would be very dark and it really depends on what you're looking for in your waves you might try googling some waves just to see what some of the forms and overlapping waves look like and see if that gives you any ideas for what kinds of shapes you want to make with your waves I was just going for it I was just trying to see what would happen and now I had this big section that has a mess in it and it doesn't look much like a wave so guess what you can do without colleagues you can just start all over again so I'm just going to put more of the color and more of the solution on it and then just redo the entire section of water and that's one of the joys of doing these particular types of mediums is that with something like a upo paper like this well I shouldn't say upo paper it's narrow paper it's the same stuff I think or very close to it as upo so I'm using upo in the way that I would use Kleenex very generically and but the paper is very forgiving and you can just keep redoing it and look how smooth I got that whole section all over again just by rolling the color over top of it a second time and this time I decided not to mess with it just move on to the techniques that I want to show you for the rest of the piece but I wanted to again get it really dry first and you can tell when when it's dry when it's not shiny anymore when it's all super shiny it's not really helpful if you're using photopaper I would not try this necessarily on the shiny side the side that you're going to get a better result for something like this where you get this almost soft buttery look to the surface is going to happen on the back side of the paper and I have an alcohol ink playlist you're welcome to go see some of my other alcohol ink videos and have other tips for using alcohol inks so now to work on the sand I have a mini mister I'm going to put some of the alcohol solution into that and I was really smart and remembered to do this off the surface of the painting how many times have I done this over the painting and made a mess and then had to clean it up many many many so what I'm going to do is spray from a high distance and I mean high as in oh two feet foot and a half two feet because that's going to give me a lighter spray and if you have you know one mister that's a very fine spray and one that's not I would recommend using the finer spray if you've got multiple choices I just have my mini misters to work with here work with here and there's a couple different other ways that you can do this as well if you don't have a mister or if you just want to try something different and this is not in the class so hopefully my students are watching and we'll get another idea for how to do a texture like this because I'm just going to put some of that color onto the surface of the freezer paper and pick it up onto a paper towel to be able to place it onto the the narrow paper onto my artwork and that's going to help to create a texture it's going to add a little bit of moisture to it it's going to add a little bit of color and you can make this as watered down or as not watered down as you need and you can also put it directly onto the paper towel and you'll get a more direct result sometimes it will be a little harsher so test it out on a scrap piece to be sure it's got the kind of look that you want and if you're using paper towel like I am make sure you turn it on a regular basis so you end up not getting a regular texture in it this is supposed to be sand it's supposed to be very organic and having something that's too regular is kind of a problem but notice how all that color that collected around the edge is now turning into part of a design element because I'm just darkening that one section so it's going to look as though that was all planned not that it was catching around the edge of the circle when I was trying to do my alcohol ink work and you can just play around with this all you want uh don't go overboard I would recommend keep it relatively simple don't put texture on every square inch give the eye some rest so that the sand is just on part of it and not on a bunch I've got a couple sections in here that started getting bloopy and I'm going to block it off so I'm only spraying on just those edges to get a little more texture brought back in but be aware that once you start spraying you're going to potentially create giant blobs because you're going to get little dots next to other little dots that'll grow into giant dots so what I try to do is as soon as I'm happy with it I try to dry it as quickly as possible and I start from high above the surface and then move down closer as I'm sure that it's not going to push because as soon as I blow on it with this Copic airbrush which has a lot of steam to it a lot of power to it then it's going to potentially push some of those dots together and make big blobs so I wanted to keep them small ones so here is the paint that I'm going to be adding I'm just using apple barrel like it's just a little cheapy bottle that I think I got at the grocery store with white paint and I've mixed it in a Dixie cup just a little bit of it with water so that it's the consistency of maybe whole milk doesn't have to be super thick and you can test out different consistencies of your own and see what effects you get because what I'm going to be doing here is using my Copic airbrush to move the color and if you're going to use a different blowing tool than I am you're going to get different results so I'm going to warn you of that right now you want to test this out and see what your blowing tool will create I'm putting a line of this liquid that like I said is the consistency of in this particular case whole milk but you can try different consistencies with your blowing tool to see what it's going to do and you can also decide whether or not you want it to move or whether just having a line of it is fine for you if that's exactly what you want I wanted to see what would happen if I blew it using the Copic airbrush system the Copic airbrush system is connected to a compressor and the compressor has a lot of power to it and the stream from the Copic airbrush is supposed to go across a marker nib that gets put into this gun that I'm holding and you press the button then it blows color across it well in this case it's just blowing straight air out of there and making these incredible spidery lines and when I started playing with it it was kind of amazing to see how this was starting to work I just thought this was something very new that I hadn't seen before and actually the reason that I even thought to try it was because on Instagram I've been watching reels there's so much fun to see 30 seconds of all different kinds of things going on around the world including tons of creativity and there are people who do acrylic pours and that's a whole different thing go google acrylic pours if you want to go down a rabbit hole but I don't want to get into pouring acrylic paints but one of the things one of the artist does for her business is she makes all kinds of beautiful objects where she does these acrylic pours of of different blues for the the water portion and she does it on pieces of wood that act as the sand and then she has this white that she blows through them and they make all these patterns and it's just gorgeous well I can't do that so this is my attempt to see what else I could do with it could acrylic watered down work on top of the alcohol ink and I found out that it did so this is one of those things where you may find that you're looking at some medium that has no relation to you you have no idea what you're going to do with it if anything and just enjoying it well think about the kinds of things you might try with it so here I tried to see what would happen if I just let the lines go themselves so this is another option if that's the kind of line that is going to work with what you've got going and you can just let gravity pull that around I didn't like that so much for mine so I then just took my air compressor or air compressor and copic air gun and just started thinning out some of those lines because I wanted some heavy lines I just wanted to be able to control them and let them get thinner as they get out to see and the thicker thicker lines would be closer to the the shoreline and here I'm just playing around with it moving the color until I get just the the right amount of whites in the places that I want them you can let this dry and then keep adding other lines of white to it as well so you can keep working on it and doing things on top of it the acrylic will take longer to dry than the alcohol ink well and that's just the nature of acrylic paint so be aware of that and I just kept going kept having fun putting different edges for the waves looking at waves online let's go look at some pictures is going to help you to see that waves come in from like different directions they'll crisscross each other they'll layer on top of each other and create really interesting patterns some of which you can see the sand through them so you could start all of these lines out in the sand area and let some of this white flow out into that area instead of leaving it just white sand be another option lots of different fun things you can do to create beautiful ocean shore types of pieces using your alcohol inks and just a little bit of white paint and other things you might try if you don't have a blowing tool I'm trying to think perhaps a very soft brush a very very very soft brush so that you could feather out some lines I would use like a nice nice flat wide brush and try to pull out some sections of white so you get larger areas and then have a smaller brush on hand so you can pull out a few lines here and there but in any case don't go too far with it don't put too much make yourself stop and walk away from it and come back and assess whether or not that's enough too much do you need more white do not because once this white goes on I wouldn't really want to try to wipe it off you might be able to use a baby wipe and wipe some down I didn't end up trying that but if you get some in an area that you don't want it might work because the alcohol might not react with a baby wipe I'm thinking if you have a water-based baby wipe so that would be another option to try I'm just trying to think ahead for things that you might find with other things that you'll be using in your home to do this in the description will be a list of supplies that I've used for this the narrow paper the clock parts and everything that I'm using the coping airbrush stuff and suggestion on getting a compressor at a place like harbor freight as they're less expensive there so the wooden piece that I got from my clock is round I put a heavy double stick on it so that it would stay down really well you can use probably different kinds of glue and added the clock mechanism to it so there is one of the clocks the other one uses more techniques from the terrestrial class the terrestrial one includes lots more textures so I did more of a rocky type beach in this one and I think both of them came out quite beautiful I'm pretty excited by that it's another attempt to do something else for World Watercolor Month that wasn't in watercolor but I'm coloring water so there you go thank you so much for joining me for this video I will see you again very soon bye