So this is my new obsession: painting Christmas ornaments with alcohol ink. I started with a package of eight glass balls and tested two different techniques. (Before applying the ink, I coated the inside of each ornament with white acrylic paint.) The first technique involved pouncing ink onto the ball using felt. I made an applicator by attaching velcro to an old film canister and attached a small piece of felt to that. After squeezing a few drops of ink onto the felt, I dabbed the ink all over the ball, adding more ink and additional colors as desired. The second technique used a can of compressed air. I squeezed one drop of ink at a time onto the ball and then sprayed the drop with air to disperse it over the surface. These are my first attempts.
After being given more glass balls for Christmas, I was able to make a bunch more ornaments. Here are some more using the felt-pouncing method.
Here are some more using the sprayed-air method.
I tried two additional techniques, which didn’t involve the inside coat of white paint, but I wasn’t quite as happy with the results. For one, I coated the inside of the ball with white glitter and used the sprayed-air method on the outside. I wanted the glitter to show through, so I used lighter colors of ink with less coverage. Somehow, these ended up being fairly monochromatic.
The other technique involved spraying ink into the inside of the ball. For the purple one, I used purple and copper ink, but the result was not as vivid as I was hoping for. The colors just looked washed out. For the blue one, I used blue and silver ink. This one was quite striking initially, but the silver ink just didn’t want to dry. I left it upside-down to drain overnight, and when I checked the next morning, all the beautiful patterns had meshed into one dark line draining down to the opening. Since the ink was still wet, I kept turning it periodically throughout the day, to encourage it to dry and also to allow the ink to spread out a bit more. It helped a little, but the result was still rather disappointing. I decided to salvage both of these failures by spraying ink on the outside of the balls: purple, burgundy and gold on the first, and blues and silver on the second.
These final two used the same techniques that I had successfully tried in the beginning but are a little different in concept. For the first one, I used the sprayed-air method, but only with metallic inks (gold, silver and copper). Because these colors are thicker due to the mica content, they don’t spread out in tendrils like the regular colors of ink. Using the felt-pouncing method and a rainbow of colors, the second ornament is my tribute to the LGBTQ rainbow flag.
