Student Gallery Video

It is my pleasure to present this Student Gallery Video of Alcohol Ink Artwork from all four classes. Please enjoy.

My First Time Lapse – Green Tree Frog

I’ve seen some wonderful time-lapse videos of other artists working and thought I’d try my hand at it.  This is a Green Tree Frog with Alcohol Ink and a few markers based on a photo by Carla Whelan at Paint My Photo (pmp-art.com).  It’s fun to see the inks spread out as I paint.  The original painting including the masking fluid was about 3 hours. You can watch it in five minutes.

How To Create A Value Swatch With Alcohol Inks

In our classes we learn that the key to making a two-dimensional object look three-dimensional it to get the lights and darks right.  I’ve posted a couple of tutorial regarding values: The Role of Values in Your Paintings and Using The Values of Your Inks (Colors, Hues).

I’ve created a video to show you how to create quick swatches of values for a couple of inks (Stream and Pinata Calabaza).  This was inspired by a lovely video by esperoart creating tonal (value) swatches with watercolors and I wanted to see if I could do it with inks and how.

2 – Blog Colors To Values Part 1 Stream and Calabaza from Sheryl Williams on Vimeo.

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Here are two different grayscales.  I use the one with 0 as white.  I punch holes in the middle to match them up.

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Here are the results of the experiment with Stream (Adirondack) and Calabaza (Pinata) inks.

If you decide to try and make some swatches, please post so we can share.

Easy Stencils Step by Step

Stencils can be fun and quite easy to work with.

For this piece I took a scrap of Yupo laying around. (We all have plenty of these).

I moved the stencil around to find pretty areas revealed through the holes in the stencil.

Traced the inside with a white gel pen.

Use a black marker and Adirondack Pitch Black to hide everything else.

Placed the image on a golden mat to see how it would look.

Easy and fun.

Playing with Transluscent Yupo Paper

I belong to wonderful groups on Facebook – Alcohol Ink Artists, Alcohol Ink & Mixed Media and KW Artists and Friends.  There are over 2,000 members from all over the world.  Our theme this week at Alcohol Ink Artists was abstracts.  I decided to post this picture:

My dear friend, Birdie came up with this method of folding paper with the ink inside.

I added a white gel pen to emphasize the shapes.

For this post, I’m going to take you through how it’s done.

Yupo Paper comes in different weights. I usually use 74# Cover Paper.  For the above picture I used 62# transluscent paper that is lighter and easy to fold.  For the following I used #104 Transluscent paper which wasn’t as easy to fold but worked fine.

 

Step 1:  Pour ink onto the paper. I used Bottle, Mountain Rose and Wild Plum. I did not use any blending solution.

 

 

 

Step 2: fold the paper with the ink still wet

 

 

 

 

Step 3: Fold some more

 

 

 

 

Step 4: Open

 

 

 

 

 

Step 5: After more folds

 

 

 

 

 

Step 6: Start to outline the color patterns with a white gel pen.

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s the finished piece.  You will notice that because it is translucent you can see my writing on the back (my bad).

 

 

 

 

Here’s one more piece done in this style. It’s fun.

Using the Values of Your Inks (Colors, Hues)

Once you have determined the values in your reference photos you’ve got to figure out how all of those paints you’ve got translate into value numbers.

 

I take each of my inks and put them on a little piece of photo paper and punch holes in them so I can arrange them by hue (color).  I have a separate ring with all of my colors by value.

 

 

 

For this example I laid out all of my green color chips:

 

Then I laid the gray-scale sheet on top of each chip to assign a gray-scale number.  It’s not always easy, but if you do it a few times you’ll get used to it.

 

Here are the green color chips arranged by gray-scale value from darkest to lightest.

JG2	Mermaid	CG4	Bottle	Meadow	Lettuce	CG3	LG4		Lake Mist
	JG3	LimeGreen	RainForest	Botanical		Citrus
			GT2

I’ve also experimented by painting the “correct” value and the “wrong” color.

Here’s Chui,  a cheeta, that works because the values are correct.   Let me know if you ever see one with these colors.

(click to enlarge)