 Hi, during these trying times of the pandemic, the City of Columbia Parks and Recreation Department realizes that choices can be limited in enhancing one's physical, social, and mental well-being. The Parks and Recreation staff have been involved in developing a number of videos in which citizens can participate in and enjoy in the privacy of their own home. These videos consist of arts and crafts, gardening, physical activity, and sports instruction, with many more to come as we work through this pandemic. Our videos will be available to you on a number of our social media outlets. We hope you enjoy and thank you very much. Good morning. My name is Bohumela Augustineva. I'm here today at Columbia Art Center and we are part of Parks and Recreations for City of Columbia. Today, I will show you how to play with alcohol ink. This is a very colorful and easy technique that anybody can do. If children are doing it, you might want to have adults to kind of play along, but I believe that adults will enjoy it as much as children would. So here I have a few samples. These styles are, or what I would recommend is that you can use tiles that have a very sleek glaze finish, so no texture or matte finish is recommended, nice and glossy. And if you're using small 4x4, they make wonderful coasters. If you're using the little bigger ones, 6x6, then you can use them as a hot plate or anything around the house. I would recommend them mostly for indoor use. If they get exposed to water too much, they might actually fade. So what you're going to need today is alcohol ink. You can buy these at any craft stores. They usually come in a smaller set of 6 in different color palettes. You will need some paper towel, you would need some alcohol, and then I have some q-tips and a tiny little brush. So first thing you do is that you clean the tile. And I'm going to start with a bigger tile so everybody can see what I'm doing. Spray it really, really well with alcohol and give it a good clean. And I am actually going to do this twice just to make sure that we didn't leave any debris behind. If you're doing this as a group activity, I would recommend to grab a sharpie and put your initials or your name on the back of your tile. Okay, now that the tile is nice and clean, you can decide on your color palette. Now this is not something that you want to plan as a painting. What you're going to end up with is an abstract piece. Of course you can add simple shapes, but that's usually after you've been playing with this for a while. So let's see, I'm going to take this nice little blue. And actually I'm going to get my tiles nice and soaked with alcohol. I actually have the alcohol in a few different versions here. I have a few different spray bottles because each spray bottle has a different effect on the alcohol itself. So I can just start dropping some of this on the tile and kind of just moving it around. So when the tile is wet, it will definitely have that watery feel to it and then it starts showing little bubbles in it. If I dry, maybe let's dry this little corner off. So you see what it does when I drop it on a dry area. If I drop it on a dry area, it will make a more of a perfect dot and it will kind of spread slowly. But it doesn't move as nicely as when you have the tile wet. Let's add some other colors to this. And I'm kind of going to leave the tile as it is, so a little corner is dry and the rest of it is wet. And I think this pretty blue would look good with nice bright red. And you can kind of overlay some of the colors. It's fun to see how they blade into each other and change colors. So you see from this nice bright tomato red to this nice beautiful deep kind of purple. So it changes a lot and it's a really beautiful process. Let's introduce another color to this. Maybe yellow would be pretty. And sometimes I drop them kind of right on the top of other colors. If you do too many colors at the same time, the piece can start looking muddy. But the colors can easily take over and add some bright green. We'll see what it does. So like you, when I'm doing this, I have no idea what the tile is going to look like. It is a better idea to come in with the concept of, okay, maybe I can pick a color palette, but you actually don't know. And that's a fun part of playing with the alcohol ink. So pieces of it are becoming a little dark and muddy. If you actually don't like what's happening on the tile, you can easily take a piece of paper towel and wipe it straight off. You can use the tile over and over until you really are happy with your result. And you might get your hands a little dirty if you are sensitive to having discolored nails or fingertips. Just put on latex gloves. If you do get your hands dirty like this, best thing to do is to do dishes. Let's do this again. Just done. I left the tile dry. And as you see, the pieces are kind of starting to melt into each other. And it's a really pretty, even fun process. Now, I want to show you something different. So if you cover your surface, you can actually take a spray bottle. And it really depends. Each spray bottle has a different type of spray, so it will affect the finish differently. And I can just do a quick spray, and it's going to change it just like that. Actually, I'm going to work on the top of this now. I'd like to introduce some different colors. Oh, this is a pretty one. That's my favorite color. I use it on every tile I do. And so you see that everything you do changes completely the entire look of the piece. And now, clearly, we have a lot more moisture on the top of the surface. So the ink moves differently. And I'm going to show you. This is a different spray bottle. So it's going to have a slightly different effect on the piece. All right. Then you do simple cleanup. Just clean your alcohol, your brush really well. You don't want to have any alcohol on it when you're using it for different projects. I would recommend to clean really well your bottles. The little bottles will actually last you quite a long time, even though it seems like that's really a little bit of material it will last for quite a bit. If you use a metallic, metallics are difficult to work with, and they're very easily can take over the piece and just enjoy. For classes of alcohol ink here at Columbia Art Center, those are classes for adults, but they are very popular, so they usually sell out. So hopefully when we reopen and offer classes again, you can come and join us. It is really fun to do this as a group activity. Also it's something you can do with your friends. It's a great activity to while you're drinking wine with your girlfriends. But as I say, you can do this also with children. Just because there is alcohol involved, I would make sure that there is also adult present.