SQUEEEEE!!!!! 🥳🥳🥳🥳
My long awaited, highly anticipated, Mother's Day present finally arrived!!

Get a load of this! 👇🥰❤🌟

Yeh, I know, more art supplies. But is there even such a thing as too many art supplies?

Originally I was after transparent resin dyes but after some research I found alcohol ink could do the same thing and more. Since neither are cheap I figured I might as well go with the more versatile option.

Aside from tinting resin, alcohol inks are best used on non porous surfaces like yupo paper, plastic, glass, ceramic etc. This is so the ink can glide across the surface to create the smokey, transparent, layered effects alcohol inks are famous for.

Tim Holtz

While doing research I found most people had Tim Holtz/Andirondak made by Ranger, Pinatas by Jacquard and Brea Reese in their collections.

I was after Brea Reese since they also sold resin molds I thought that brand would be more suited for my needs but while shopping the Ranger inks went on sale and I switched brands last minute.

One thing to note with these Ranger inks is that even though the inks were labelled Adirondaks on the website they arrived in Tim Holtz packaging so I think Ranger is simplifying their range by calling everything Tim Holtz. The only difference in packaging is between the normal colours, the pearls and the mixatives.

And of course I had to have the storage tin.

I'm not sure if I got 30 inks because the tin could hold 30 or I got the tin because I got 30 inks ~ either way it worked out in the end because that tin is sexy.

I especially love the plastic holder inside that keeps the ink bottles in place AND the way the tin lid is bigger than the base.

Colour wise I probably got a lot of similar shades but getting the sets were cost effective and I figured the colour sets were meant to be used together and wanted to see how they looked.

I'm pretty sure I could always mix colours together to create a new shade so I wasn't too fussed.

Test pieces

The one thing I didn't get was blending solution because it was out of stock. Fortunately I had rubbing alcohol and isopropyl alcohol at home and used those instead to dilute and move the ink around.

These test pieces are made using the Beach Deco inks on gloss ceramic tiles.

I have to admit it's not too bad for my first try. I think it's largely due to the inks though.

I decided to spray a bit of isopropyl alcohol over test pieces 02 and you can see the droplets it created.

The great thing with these is because it's alcohol based and it's on a non porous surface, if you don't like the composition you can erase it all with alcohol. On the down side you can really smell that alcohol!

Another pitfall with this atm is because isopropyl alcohol is a main ingredient to hand sanitizers it's quite hard to source and what you can find has been marked up due to scarcity. So really not the best hobby to have picked up in light of everything lol.

That said I have zero regrets. I love them already and I can't wait to experiment with them a bit more on tiles and on resin.

Have you used alcohol inks before? Which brand's your favourite? Any tips and tricks you want to pass on?

Let me know!