My New Passion

Ink on clear glass ornaments.

Alcohol Inks!  Several years ago, I took a class at a painting conference. It was using alcohol inks on dominos to make into pendants. It was fun and I bought a few alcohol inks but I did nothing with it. Fast forward a few years and a facebook friend of mine Riv posted some of her work. One in particular really got my attention so I thought, "hey I've got those inks".

I had plenty of porcelain and glass being a china and decorative painter so I pulled out a few pieces, the inks and alcohol and gave it a whorl. They turned out beautiful. I was pulling out porcelain, antique

Inks on porcelain ornaments enhanced with gold leaf pen.

glass, glass vases, you name it I experimented on it. Alcohol inks are for nonporous surfaces but I pulled out bisc just for grins. That too had interesting results.

The freedom I find in letting the ink do it's abstracted thing is exhilarating.  I have learned this takes a bit of skill but more than that it takes patience. I'm not much of a patient person. I generally like to have immediate results but this is good because it's teaching me to wait and watch as I frequently just do it one drop at a time.

No now I'm obesessed. The next thing will be finding that yugo paper to do larger frameable art! Life is good especially with art....

Student Projects

So my china painting students are starting early on their Christmas ornaments. This is the second project. The first series of classes were a wild rose plate. Every china painter starts with the wild rose.

This time they wanted to do ornaments. The first step was for them to trace the design & do the line work with pen. The powdered china paint is mixed with oil made to an inky consistency and they use a crow quill pen to do outlines. Line work is then fired. You can see from the poinsettia below how it turns out. The next class they do the painting "between the lines" as shown in their cardinal ornaments.

Then after that, they will do one more painting (and firing) where the colors are deepened.

The little dog is my ornament. It is not pen work. I just sketched it on with a stabilo pencil. This is the first fire for it. There will be one or two more paintings and firing, depending on how deep I get the color the next time around...Merry Christmas a little early! LOL