I absolutely love looking back through photos from an alcohol ink workshop. I enjoy creating blog posts from all workshops but with alcohol ink workshops in particular I often see wonderful passages and organic shapes in all the initial experimental studies that I missed on the day. Combine this with the fantastic variety of mark making and vibrant colours its lovely to see them all together.
Last Saturdays workshop was held at Tindalls, Colchester branch with 14 of us in total. Thank you so much to all the students who came along, with such a large group of us it does tend to get a bit fumy by the afternoon but this didn’t slow anyone down as you can see from the photos below. We began the morning session experimenting with the alcohol inks. We used Jacquard Piñata inks with 99.9% isopropyl on Yupo paper and various tools for creating different effects from compressed air to kitchen roll!
After lunch (and a little fresh air) we attempted to create some more challenging pieces using the inks. To aid in achieving a little more structure some students used masking fluid to contain the ink as well as using alcohol ink markers for details. Some students worked from reference images and others from imagination. Alcohol inks are most effective on non porous surfaces so I bought in some glasses to demonstrate how effective the inks are on many different substrates and students decorated their glasses (below) to wonderful effect.
Alcohol inks were fun, and totally different from the coloured pencil workshops I’ve done with Robyn. They require precision but this medium meant anything could appear on the page. Relaxed and enjoyable teaching sessions every time .