You can be as long with the artists who work with alcohol ink and you will see something humorous. Their styles, however, are not similar, but loose, controlled, chaotic, super minimal, they all silently rely on the same trick. Click our extra resources for another topics!
It is not a fancy piece. It is not some secret brand.
It’s timing.
More specifically: it is not the frequency of adding blending solution or alcohol, but of when.
The first ones are mostly flooding on the surface. It all disperses, colors intermingle and it looks cool five minutes. Then it becomes muddy. Flat. Kind of lifeless.
Professionals wait.
They enabled the ink to partially dry. Not fully dry. Nor soaking wet as well. That clumsy half way position when the edges are beginning to cling to the surface yet the core is still loose. It is where the magic lies.
Put a little isopropyl alcohol in at that point and the reaction is a lot different. It does not scour it all away, it makes the pigment kicked out in these soft, organic ripples. You get depth. You get contrast. You have those petal-like ones that are said to be hard.
They’re not.
They are just put in the time.
This I learned the difficult way. Initially, I would still strive to correct the circumstances by pouring more alcohol. More blending solution. More everything. It always complicated things. The colors became depersonalized. It was as though it were batter into the pan–and when it was in it was out.
One day I was inattentive, however (this is with the phone, actually), and I came back a minute later, and spilled alcohol on semi-dried ink by mistake.
That one was a hundred times better than what I was going to do.
I do it deliberately since that time.
The other thing pros do–they see what the sides do. This is the subtle shift of alcohol ink whereby the shine dims off slightly before it sets. That’s your window. Forget it and the liquor will lie there. Knock it and it opens.
And this is what people do not like to hear, it is inconsistent.
Humidity changes it. It is altered by paper or yupo quality. By the weight of your first drop is the time changed. You do not have a formula to master.
You sort of get a feel of it. Sharing cooking with no quantification.
At this stage other artists lean the surface slightly and pour in alcohol. Not radically,–to shoot the stream. It comes up with these long, light airy gradients, which are intentional but informal.
You will have to test it too soon, and all will slide. Oh, it is already too late, nothing stirs.
It lacks also a restraint factor that is not addressed adequately. Professionals stop sooner. They do not go on poking the piece merely because they can. When that opportune blossom follows they leave it.
That is the actual discipline.
Alcohol ink demands such overworking. It is virtually pleading to it.
However, the finest of these are certainly not continuous interventions, but one or two timely ones.
That is why in the event that your work looks flat or chaotic as such, then it is likely that it is not your colors or tools.
It’s your timing.
And as it hits it steals a couple of bad pieces. That’s normal.