Holiday Wishes

      This time is very important to me as reminder that only Peace and Love are the answer. 

To all my friends, family and anyone who is visiting, I wish you the very best this Holiday season.  


            
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Happy Thanksgiving and Hanukkah

      I wish you all a bountiful harvest of good food, good friends and family along                                                             with many Blessings!

Making Alcohol Inks

Before I bought the Ranger alcohol inks I am using, I tried to make my own. I found a couple of videos on You Tube, but I didn't have the ingredients on hand and the process of making them seemed to be more trouble and expensive that is was worth. I decided to use some old drawing inks that I bought years ago for a class I took with Maxine Masterfield  As it turned out they are not as saturated or waterproof as the Adirondack Inks from Ranger alcohol-inks. Also they really don't work quite like the Ranger inks with their magical and almost uncontrollable behavior that fascinates me. Possibly the homemade recipes on You Tube are better. However, I don't plan to try them. 

 

The painting above was created with my homemade alcohol inks. I do like the fact that I can wipe out the colors with a damp sponge and burnish them with my fingers in a vinyl glove. Because the surface is so fragile I doubt if I can spray them with fixative. 

 

Here are the links that seemed to have the best information:

This link is about making the inks from fabric dye. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jq1WguOBgg4

Another link is to make the ink from Sharpie markers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksVCq1dF6F8

If anyone has any experience successfully painting with homemade alcohol inks I would love to hear about it!

Child's Play

A recent trip to Tuesday Mornings, (a local discount store that sells buyouts), rewarded me with finding a few inexpensive journals. One of the smaller ones I am using just for my alcohol ink on Yupo paintings. I attached these paintings in the journal with photo corners so I can remove them if I decide to edit something or on the wonderful chance someone wants to buy one! The larger journal is for mixed media art.  

The image above is the first page in the large journal. I began by collaging some patterned tissue paper. Using old children's blow pens I had stashed away, I sprayed the page using various things for stencils. I also used alcohol inks, pencils and Caran d'Ache Neocolor II Artists' Crayons.

It is all child's play (maybe you can find her in the image). I hope I can keep play in mind and continue. I usually start out like a house on fire and then quit!

More Alcohol Inks

Other things, including house and cat sitting at my son's, have eclipsed my resolve to blog more. In my studio, I have several little experimental paintings using alcohol inks on old Yupo watercolor scrapes. The one featured here turned into a landscape with a blue sun. I added a few birds with a Dewert Inktense pencil. I hope that I will get back to doing more of these soon.

I have also been experimenting with children's blow pens that I bought for my grandchildren to use when they visited. They lost interest in them so I decided to use them instead of throwing them away. They really require a lot of breath to make them work. It may because they are old and the ink is low.

In the mean time, I am working on an idea for a piece to go over my bead. It has to be lightweight, as I do not want it to fall on my head! I think I will do something on foam core board and not frame it. 

Funny thing not long ago I could not get interested in doing anything, now I have too many irons in the fire! Go figure. Mood swings?

Yupo Revision

Cropping more old Yupo watercolor paintings into 6"x 6" pieces, I chose this piece to play with. I did not use much alcohol ink this time because I was intrigued with the colors and textures going on in the existing watercolor paint. I chose graphite pencil along with a white gel pen for the line work. 

Fonts in paintings have always fascinated me. They add contrast and bit of mystery, like a possible code. I have a rubber stamp of the word 'escape' and it seemed very descriptive of this little painting. Some stencil work and I called this one finished.