I saw this technique demoed at one of the craft shows and was instantly excited. It involves a couple of fairly new products: Ranger's Alcohol Lift (a colour free ink pad) and a new, innovative, plastic card known as 'Yupo'. I used these together with an older product: Ranger's Alcohol inks. You can see in the photo that I prepared my work surface by spacing out the alcohol inks with all the lids off. They are fine like this for upto an hour -according to Tim Holtz. The alcohol lift technique works perfectly on Yupo but if you haven't found this brilliant product yet, you can use Ranger foil tape, acetate or glass. It won't work on glossy card - how do I know that? 😉
However, I did die-cut some glossy card into various sized tags because when you use the alcohol lift ink pad to stamp onto an alcohol inked tag, it lifts the colour from the tag and you can then transfer the ink onto another surface, turning the alcohol inks into a stamping medium. Not only that but the stamped image is then permanent. Who thought alcohol inks could produce stamped images? Well, now it can. Here's some photos demonstrating the process:
This first step uses various alcohol ink colours (I used 4/5 here) which I pressed down over an entire tag before adding a few drops of the alcohol blending solution to help merge the colours. I then pressed down again all over the tag.
I then added more drops of different alcohol inks straight on to the tag, pressed down again to merge the colours, until I was happy with the result.
A delicious result. The tag surface Ive used here is a Ranger product. It's quite expensive - about £12.99 for 5 X A4 sheets! So I hunted around for cheaper alternatives following recommendations by other Crafters. Sadly, I cannot remember where I bought this cheaper pack but it was a lot cheaper! It's also thicker. I think it was described as a chalk board product for schools but you can google it, I'm sure. Here are the results of playing with both substrates:
As you can see, not a lot of difference so far. But how did both and the other substrates cope when I used the Alcohol lift ink pad? Let's see:
Press down lightly on the ink pad and apply a little pressure onto the inked tag. Then lift and stamp onto another tag to get the inked image.
The same alcohol inks were used on both substrates and there is a slight difference in the results but not such a difference for me to prefer one over the other at this stage. I must admit, the results varied on the cheap Yupo but were successful every time on the Ranger product. Here are the results on the other substrates.
Alcohol inks work beautifully on glass.
And fairly well on the acetate. Once you remove the alcohol ink to leave this 'ghost' image, it's. important that you lightly dab over the ghost image with a piece of kitchen roll. This gets rid of the remaining alcohol. Don't swipe across until you are sure you have dabbed first and the image has emerged clearly.
I'm finishing this first part of using the Alcohol lift ink pad with a couple of stamped images on the different Yupo tags. You can see the image is much clearer on the Ranger Yupo but the transferred images are equally good. This is one of my new 'Art by Marlene' stamps. Tomorrow, I will post a second technique using the alcohol lift technique with stencils. Until then I hope you have fun with this technique.
