 Hi everyone, my name is Jessica Maga. I'm an alcohol ink artist and I'm here to show you a few of my favorite alcohol ink techniques so that you can try them yourself at home. So let's get started. Technique number one, palette knife. So for this technique we're going to use a rigid palette brush and we're going to push the ink around the page. I'm going to use some colors that blend well together and then I'm going to also choose a color that pops a little bit. So the first colors that I'm going to use are the yellow and the pink. I'm going to start with my yellow on the page and I'm just going to forcefully kind of push that along the page. You want to just spread all that ink out. You don't want any pools of ink. I'm going to move on to my pink color and this pink will blend a bit with the yellow to create a nice orange so you want to work quickly enough that you're spreading your ink. It doesn't pool and now I'm going to add our complementary color, a bit of blue. You want to avoid adding too much blue so that things don't get muddy as you work. And I think that looks great. So that's the palette knife technique. Technique number two, creating fades. So for this technique we're going to work on creating some fades in a couple different ways. And the first technique we're going to dot some of our ink onto our Yupo paper and we're going to give that a second to dry up a bit and then we're going to add our isopropyl into the center and lift the page at the same time and sort of guide the ink. You'll use a cotton pad or paper towel or a rag to soak up some of that excess and then I'm going to also use a hand blower to spread this out just slightly. So really what you're doing is you're using the 99% isopropyl to help dilute that ink spot and guide the ink so that it slowly fades out. I'm going to use my hand blower again just to dry this slightly and anywhere the ink is pooling you can soak up as well. So you'll start to slowly get this interesting faded technique and now we've got a bit here and we're going to fade it out this way. So I'm going to add just a tiny bit more ink to the page, give it a second to dry, add my alcohol into the center again and I'm going to angle the page in a different way this time. You kind of guide that alcohol. So these types of fades can be used to create flowers or you can use them on their own as just an abstract element in your art pieces. It's got a really nice gradual gradient to it and a bit of a wispy effect. So the second fade technique that we're going to try today is a very similar technique where we're going to put the ink onto the page and we're going to add our isopropyl into the center and then we're going to actually just use our hand blower. We're not going to move our page around. We're going to use this blower to sort of fade that ink and guide it and the blower will start to dry the ink so you'll start to get a bit of a wispiness as you dry. Now that this part is drying we're actually going to add a little bit more of our alcohol into the center again and we're going to pull it out, follow and continue to use the hand blower and you'll just put isopropyl alcohol wherever you want that fade to follow. You can continue to sort of fade out those edges as much or as little as you like. Alright and that is the second fade technique. Take number three, creating rings with a blow dryer. For this technique we're going to use a blow dryer to create some rings with alcohol ink so I'm going to start with a tiny dot of isopropyl and I'm going to add some blue ink right into the center of that dot. That's just going to help our ink spread a little bit more. Now we're going to add a decent amount of isopropyl and we're going to swirl our page just a size bit to help these inks and the alcohol get mixed together. I'm actually going to add just a tiny bit more alcohol so now that we've got a circle here we're going to use the blow dryer to dry this and you want to aim your blow dryer toward the edge as you're drying. So I'm just working in circular motions here and as the ink, as the blow dryer dries our ink it starts to create this very subtle ringed effect. So I'll do another one just to show that technique again. I'm just dotting some alcohol down and maybe we'll go with the pink this time. A few dots of the ink and add some isopropyl to that. I'm just actually going to add a little bit more pink here. I'm going to swirl this around to sort of mix them. It shakes a bit irregular but that's alright. Now we're going to again aim the blow dryer at the outside and slowly bring it in as it dries. Air from the blow dryer will dry your ink quickly and that's how you get the line effect. You don't want to place the blow dryer directly on the ink, you just want to kind of keep it off to the side. And then the other thing that you can do once this is dried down is you can reactivate another portion of it and use your blow dryer. So as you can see here the heat from the blow dryer has created this really interesting effect. So we've got these rings and you start to get these really intricate details in the lines as you use your blow dryer to dry the alcohol and the ink. Technique number four, ink drips. So for this technique we're going to create a bit of a drippy ink effect. I'm going to add some ink right onto a sponge brush, add a little bit of isopropyl on there as well just to help the ink flow a bit better. I'm going to brush this onto my paper. I'm going to choose a second color and I'm just going to do the same technique, add some isopropyl to help the ink flow, brush that on as well. Mix the green and the blue just a little bit and now we're going to start the dripping technique so we're going to add a little bit of ink at the top, add some isopropyl to that to help it flow down the page. This is what's going to give you your drip effect so just let that flow down as much as possible and you can keep adding the isopropyl to help the inks flow more. Any areas that are really heavy with ink you can add more drops so you'll start to notice that the ink will start pooling at the bottom of your page and at that point you can use cotton pad or a paper towel to sort of catch some of that extra ink stripping and I'm actually just going to flip it and I'm going to let it flow down the opposite way and as it starts to dry you'll get this really interesting sort of dripping ink effect. So by mixing our inks and our isopropyl and letting them slide down the page we've created this interesting ink drip effect. Technique number five, adding details with alcohol. So for this effect I'm going to show you how to add details into your inks with alcohol. I'm going to start by creating an ink wash on my page and I'll go with green, add a tiny bit of alcohol to that to help the ink flow. We're just going to wash this over the page and I might just add a tiny bit of blue just for a bit more interest here. Once your inks have dried on the page I'm going to use a needle dropper bottle just for more control and this has 99% isopropyl alcohol in it and we're just going to drop the ink into our piece to create textures. So you can do dots along your page all side by side. You can do lines to create different textures. You can sort of stipple it on your page to create a bit of an irregular texture or we can add ink and tilt our page, sort of guide the ink downward and create drips. So those are just a few different techniques that you can use to create texture in your ink using isopropyl alcohol. Seek number six, sponge gradient wash. For this technique we're going to use a sponge brush to create a gradient wash over our Yupo paper. I'm going to start by choosing some different colors and loading them onto my brush. I'm going to go with pink. You want to saturate your sponge, do some yellow, bit of green and purple and you can use as many or as little colors as you want for this. I just want to do a rainbow effect and I'm going to add a tiny bit of isopropyl to this sponge brush just to help the inks flow. Alright and once that's done we're going to just drag it along our page and create a very fun gradient effect. I'm just going to overlap this one more time. You can move your brush in any shape or any pattern that you want to create this fun gradient effect. Technique number seven, saran wrap mosaic. So for this technique we're going to choose some bright colors and I'm just going to dot them straight onto our Yupo paper, brush them through with a sponge brush and I'm just going to load my brush with a tiny, tiny bit of isopropyl alcohol and you don't want too much ink on your page for this because when we apply the saran wrap it will take a little while to dry. Now I'm going to add my pink here and sort of blend these two together. I'm just washing my brush out a bit with some isopropyl and I'm going to squeeze out the excess and then use a cotton pad to dry some of the brush and then I'm going to add my pink to the rest here and I just washed my brush so that when we do this pink part it doesn't continue to turn orange. So now that we've got a nice wash and our piece is still a bit wet we're going to take some saran wrap and we're going to gently place it over and the saran wrap will start to cling. It's not wet enough. That's okay, if that happens what you can do is you can just re-work your page with a bit more alcohol and a bit more ink. I'm actually just going to use a cotton pad for this to spread it around, putting the ink right onto the cotton pad to create this wash. Alright so you do have to work a little bit quickly with this and while it's still wet and tacky that's when you want to get your saran wrap down and as you apply the saran wrap it will start to cling and create a mosaic effect and you can just press down specific areas where you want it to cling more and lift any areas that you don't want it to cling to and that is the saran wrap gradient technique. So this is obviously not the finished product. After this is completely dried we're going to peel this up. You can check it every so often to see if it's dried. If the inks are moving at all you don't want to take your saran wrap off. I generally leave mine overnight just to be safe and then the next day I'll pull off the saran wrap and I'll be left with a great mosaic effect. So I did one of these the other day and I'll just show you what a finished one can look like. So in the areas where the saran wrap was in contact with our yupo you can see a line and then the areas where the saran wrap is raised it leaves a different sort of shape there so it ends up being a really nice mosaic. So I just wanted to show the finished mosaic effect from the pieces that Hannah and I worked on the other day. When you peel this saran wrap off you're left with a beautiful mosaic effect and that one looks great as well. So yeah this is just another example of a type of technique that you can use for larger art pieces or you can cut them up and use them for collages. Alright so that's all the techniques I have for you today. I hope you learned something new and thank you so much for watching. Bye for now.