Drip, Drop

"Color! What a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams."   Paul Gauguin

The Diva's challenge this week is to use color. Looking back, I realized that most of my recent blogs  have been about using color in some form. So here is another one.

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote a blog about using alcohol inks on glossy paper as a background for tangling. You can see that post here. It's interesting to see how much my tangling style has changed and evolved since then. During the last year I have used my alcohol inks to make lots of colored tiles on watercolor paper, but have not used them again on glossy paper. I've been inspired by seeing other people post about using the inks, so I decided it was time to play with them again. Actually, a while ago I bought Yupo paper (you can read about it by clicking on the link), and a new book about creating with alcohol inks, Pigments of Your Imagination. And they've been sitting around waiting for me for some time now. The time finally came last week.

I cut up the Yupo into pieces about 3 1/2 x 5 inches, and following the book and other information I've collected, I squirted, and blew, and splattered, and tilted, and pushed, and pulled. It was so much fun to play, not ever really knowing what to expect. I used both Ranger inks and Spectrum Noir inks, along with 91% alcohol. I used straws, and credit cards, and coffee stirrers, and q-tips. The result was many, many, beautiful, bright, inky little pieces of art. Some of them are so pretty on their own that I almost didn't want to tangle on them.

Here's a picture of one of the first ones I used. This was created by dropping ink on the paper, letting it spread, dropping more ink, dripping alcohol, and repeating those steps until I was happy with the results. Adding alcohol helps the ink spread, and can also lighten the colors. This is the before...

And this is the after (using Sakura Microperm pens)...

I started by tangling the obvious circular shapes, and then filled in behind, leaving a few sections of color untouched. 

The next one is one of my favorite "tiles" that I made. I love the color combination. It was created by laying down lines of ink, then spreading with a straw or coffee stirrer (I don't remember which), and tilting, and spritzing alcohol on it.

I wasn't worried about that green spot that somehow found it's way onto the paper, because I knew that once I tangled it would disappear...

Due to the process of spreading the inks around, it is inevitable that some of the ink seeps to the underside of the paper. Most of the time it just looks like a mess, and I don't really care what the back looks like. But every once in a while the back side turns out to look really nice and artistic, purely by accident. Like on the pink and yellow piece above. Here's what it looked like.

Some of that was from ink seeping under the edges, and the different colors you see were leftover on the craft sheet I was working on. I thought it could look really nice if I tangled on all that white space in between the beautiful inky edges. So that's what I did.

I'm not sure that I really like the combination of tangles that I chose, but did like the effect of tangling down the middle. A big stack of more of these "tiles" awaits my pen, and I'll share some of them another time. If any of you are interested in learning how to use these inks, I would highly recommend the book I linked to above. 

Happy inking and tangling!