Alcohol ink is a really versatile product and has been making a real come-back in recent years. It comes in all shapes and sizes, from the traditional bottles of alcohol ink, to alcohol pen refills, and these days we even have metallic mixatives and pearlescent colours to play with too!

This feature combines alcohol ink with texture. Although daunting to some, as alcohol ink is not the most widely used crafting product, you don’t have to be an experienced crafter to work with it. Alcohol ink is such an easy product to master, you can get really cool results in no time.

The projects I am sharing vary in difficulty from simply using textured cardstock, all the way up to using dimensional mediums through stencils to give the texture. Adding visual texture can easily be achieved using household items like cling film or sponges.

I’ve kept the decoration of these cards really simple as the backgrounds are the focal points of the cards, and the great thing about alcohol ink is that it dries really quickly, so you can recreate cards like these in no time. When combining texture with alcohol ink, think about the embossing folders or different types of cardstock you already have in your stash, adding alcohol ink can really spice up your older products and give them a new lease of life! Alternatively, if you’re into slightly more messy crafting, pull out your stencils and texture pastes and have fun experimenting, adding the alcohol ink on the paste while it’s wet, or after it’s dried.

If you’re not into die-cutting and embossing folders, keep it simple and use materials from around the house to add texture, you never know what you’ll find in the kitchen to give cool textured effects. Try using household items like cling film or sponges.

Whatever kind of crafter you are, you’ll be sure to have a great time creating backgrounds using alcohol ink and texture, so dust off your alcohol ink, and bring out all the stash and start playing, you’ll be thrilled with your results!

1

Choose white or light-coloured textured cardstock, pick a few analogous colours of alcohol ink (I used a mix of Copic and Pearl) and an ink applicator with a felt pad.

2

Load up your ink applicator with colour, adding each one in a separate stripe on the felt pad.

3

Swipe your inky applicator across the panel, rotating 180 degrees and swiping again to get a stripy pattern.

4

Work to fill the panel with ink. If you don’t have textured cardstock, you can use an embossing folder to get a similar effect

5

Trim the inked panel to 10x13cm then die-cut elements from white cardstock to decorate the card, using an off cut of the inked cardstock as an accent strip.

This article is tagged as:

Stamping Die-cutting Simply Cards & Papercraft skillbuilder Christine Smith papercraft Alcohol ink SCP193 alcohol ink backgrounds project how-to