How to Apply Dye Ink on Polymer Clay

Ilysa: Hi, I’m Ilysa Kira: And I’m Kira Ilysa: And you’re watching episode 5 of polymer clay TV. Today we’re going to show you how to work with alcohol inks. These ones we’re using a called pinata colors. They are very cool because they dry fast. I'm going to show you how to apply them directly on to a piece of translucent clay that I’ve already conditioned and rolled into a flat sheet. You don’t need a lot of ink, I just start off with 1 drop and rub it around my finger until I get a line of it because I’m going to stripe out this design. So there’s my red, it's actually called chilli pepper and go with the purple next. A little goes a long way with alcohol inks. You should probably wear gloves because it gets a little messy or just wash your hands really well afterwards. I’ll go with a blue, you can wipe any extra off. If you’re starting a project you can get it done fast. I just stripping it and I can start again with the next color which is red until I get a rainbow effect. I want to cover the entire piece of translucent then after that, you want to make sure it's all dry. Kira is going to show you how to mix the ink directly into the clay to change the color of the clay. You don’t have to be really neat with this because it's just a neat effect that it makes and you don’t have to have straight lines. You just have to have the color on there. Here, I stripped it and I'm going to let this dry. Kira: Alcohol ink is different from pigment ink. It's more like a dye; it seeps into the translucent or whatever color you put it on. This is not the same type of ink that you would use to stamp an image on the clay. It wouldn’t work like that. I just smeared some in there and some is just an approximation. There’s no real recipe. You can come up with your own recipe of how much ink you want to put into the clay in order to change it to whatever color you want. You can mix colors of ink. I just used the chilli pepper and I think I might use a drop of blue to see how that comes out and maybe create my own purple. Ilysa: If you can mix the co0lors and get all kinds of neat colors. Kira: Like I said, a little goes a long way. I just smeared them up a little bit, it will dirty your hands but alcohol ink is soluble with rubbing alcohol so if you dirty yourself up you can go get some isopropyl rubbing alcohol and wash off your hands and your work surface. Over here, I have the chilli pepper mixed to translucent. This is what our color, passion purple. This is the lime green and this is my own blend of chilli pepper with a drop of baja blue. Ilysa: you want to remember that you can't use a stamp and put the ink on the stamp because this alcohol ink will just bleed into the clay Kira: the image will just bleed. You can’t make an image with this. This is for dyeing. If you think about it that way, it's for dyeing your clay colors or for the effect, which Ilyse is going to show you. It’s just for turning the clay colors or making an effect where it's going to bleed. Heres a new color that I made and if you use translucent as a base, you can make as many different colors as you can think of. Ilysa: Definitely. I will show you how to finish this project. I painted on my alcohol ink and I’ve actually use a total of one bar of clay. This is half of a bar and I’m going to knead up another half bar, make a flat sheet again and I'm going to sandwich that ink in there. I want to place that right on top of the alcohol ink, give a nice firm pat, you can even come in with your roller. You want to make sure that there is no air bubbles in between the 2 bars of clay sandwiching. What I’m going to do now is I'm going to roll it up. You have to make sure that your clay is conditioned well or it will start cracking as you roll it up. What I’m creating here is what I call a cane. The pattern when I create this cane is going to go to the entire length and I can cut slices off. Here I am just doing like a jellyroll like you would make a jelly roll cake. It's cracking a little because translucents are tricky, just push it together so that you close up that crack. You don’t want to have the cracks in there. And there I go. This is what it's going to look like hen you’re done. What you want to do with canes is you want to make sure the ends mellow together really well. I’ll start rolling it, trying to get it to all mellow together. Then I like to run my edges like this on my work surface. That will help to close up those ends. You can pinch them close if they need to be pinched close so that it contains your design. Keep rolling it until you feel like it's mellowed together and you’ll feel it because there wont feel like there’s any air pockets or anything in there. After that, you want to start cutting it to make sure that your design. So, you start with one slice and that’s pretty good but let’s gets another one to see if we can get it really clear. That’s actually the design. I’ve created a cane just by using only translucent clay, one complete bar of translucent clay and the alcohol inks. So, it makes it really neat effect and you can use all colors that you want. There are even more colors than this but this colors look really good together. You can take those and you can make candleholders. We have some candleholders over here that we’ve made. On these ones, we’ve blended the clay like Kira showed you and then rolled it up. We did that a little differently but if you like check out our downloads, we’re going to show you a complete project on how to make the candleholders and everything. Kira: And then there’s one more thing that I wanted to show you that you can do with the alcohol inks and translucent liquid clay. This one is caydough and I’ve taken some little re-closable containers that are made for small amounts of paint. All I did here is pour some of the liquid clay into there and put a couple of drops of lime green in this case and mix it in. That makes it almost like a paint. You can paint it directly unto an object and fire it or you could paint it on to some more clay to make a different color on the surface. There are a lot of different ways that you can use for the inks. You just have to use your imagination. If you wanted to paint like a scene on here, you can mix up as many different colors as you wanted and paint right on to glass. Some people that we’ve met have done that where it actually looks like stained glass. If you use a black line of clay as your rope, put on there, and made a design. You can paint the cells, use translucent clay with ink in it, and create a stained glass effect. Ilysa: Yes, so have fun with it, try a bunch of different colors, and see the combinations. Translucent like I said works the best but you can color any colored clay with the ink. So, just play around with it and you’ll come up with some neat results. Thanks for joining us today and we hope you’ll join us next time.