How to Work with Polymer Clay and Dye Ink

Ilysa Bierer: Hi! I’m Ilysa. Kira Slye: And I’m Kira. Ilysa Bierer: And you’re watching episode five of Polymer Clay TV. Today we want to show you how to work with alcohol inks. These ones we’re using are called pinata colors and they are very cool because they dry fast. And what I want to show you is how to apply them directly on to a piece of translucent clay that I’ve already conditioned and rolled into a flat sheet. And you go need a lot ink. I just start of with one drop and I kind of just rub it around with finger until I get a line of it because I am going to stripe out this design. So there is my red. It is actually called chili pepper and I think I will go with the purple next and just a little—little goes along way with alcohol inks. And I think I’m going to use a different finger. You should probably wear gloves but I get a little messy, I do not care. Just wash your hands really well after wards. Okay that is some purple. I can go a little blue, I mean a lot of blue. It does not matter. You can just wipe any extra off and alcohol ink dries really fast. So if you’re starting a project, you can get it done pretty fast. So I am just striping it like this and I can start again with the next color which is red, until I get like a rainbow effect. I want to cover the entire piece of translucent and then after I do that, you want to make sure that it is all dry. So I am just going to finish the second and Kira is going to show you how you can mix the ink directly into the clay to change the color of the clay which is really cool. I need a little more purple and you do not have to be really neat with this because it is just a neat effect that it makes, and you do not have to have like really straight lines or anything. You just have to have the color on there. Okay, so here I striped it and I’m going to let this dry, and Kira is going to show you how she takes the alcohol ink and puts it into the clay to change the color. Kira Slye: Alcohol ink is different from pigment ink and that it’s actually more of a dye. It actually sips into the translucent or whatever other color you put it on. So this is not the same type of ink that you would use, let’s say just stamp in image onto the clay. It would not work like that. So I just smeared some on there and some is really just in approximation. There is no meal recipe. You can come up with your own recipes of how much ink you want to put into the clay in order to change it, whatever color you want you can mix colors of ink. I just use the chili pepper and I think I might use a drop of blue and see how that comes out, maybe create my own purple Ilysa Bierer: Now if you can mix the colors and get all kinds of neat colors. Kira Slye: Yeah and like Ilysa said, a little goes a long way. And I just smeared a little bit. It will dirty your hands but an 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 the work surface. And over here, I have—that is chili pepper mix into translucent. This is passion purple. This is the lime green and this is my own little blend of chili pepper with the drop of baja blue. Ilysa Bierer: And you want to remember that you can’t stamp into—use a stamp and put the ink on the stamp because this alcohol comes up bleed into the clay. Kira Slye: Right. The image will just bleed. Ilysa Bierer: Yeah. Kira Slye: You can’t make an image with this. This is for dying. If you think about it that way, it’s for dying your clay colors or for the effect that Ilysa is going to show you from just turning the clay color or for making an effect where it is going to bleed. So here is 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 Bierer: Definitely. Okay well, I will show you how. Now to finish up this project, I’ve painted on my alcohol ink and I have actually use the total of one bar of clay. This is half a bar and I am going to need up another half of bar, make a flat sheet again and I am going to sandwich that ink in there. So I want you to place that right on top of the alcohol ink, give it a nice firm pat, can even come in with your roller. You want to make sure that there is no air bubbles in between the two bars of clay sandwiching. So what I am going to do now is I am going to just roll it up and you have to make sure that your clay is condition well or it will start cracking as you go to roll it up. And what I am creating here is what I call a cane and the pattern when I create this cane is going through the entire length. And I can cut slices of. So here I am just doing like a jelly roll like you would make a jelly roll cake. And here, it’s cracking a little because it’s—translucent is a little tricky, Just push it together so that you can close up that crack. You do not want to have the cracks in there. And there I go. And this is what it’s going to look like when you are done. And there I go, and this is what it’s going to look like when your done and what you want to do with canes, if you want to make sure this ends melt together really well. So I start rolling it, trying to get it to all melt together. And then I like run my edges like this on my work surface. And that will help to close up those ends. They need to be pinched close so that it contains your designing there. So you keep rolling it until you feel like it is all melted together and you will feel it because they won’t feel that there is no air pockets or anything in there. So after that, you want to start cutting in to make sure that you design. So you start with one slice and that is pretty good. But let us get another one to see if we can get really clear. So that is actually the design so I’ve created a cane just by using only translucent clay. One complete bar of translucent clay and the alcohol inks. So it makes a really neat effect and you can use all colors that you want. There is even more color than this but this color looks really good together. And you can take those and you can make candle holders. We’ve got some candle holders over here that we’ve made. Actually on this one, we’ve actually blended the clay like Kira showed you and then rolled it up. So we did that in a little different way. But if you check out our downloads, we are going to show you a complete project on how to make the candle holders and everything. Kira Slye: And there is one more thing I wanted to show you that you can do with the alcohol inks and translucent liquid clay. This one is kato clay and I’ve taken some little re-closable containers that are made for small amounts of paint. And all I did here is pour some of the liquid clay into there and put a couple drops of lime green in this case and mix it in. And that makes almost like a paint. You can paint it directly onto an object and fire it or you can paint it onto some more clay to make a different color on the surface. So there are a lot of different ways that you can use the inks. We’ll just use our imagination. If you wanted to paint like scene on here you can mix up as many different colors as you wanted and actually paint right onto glass. Some people that we’ve met have done that where it actually looks like a stained glass. So if you use like a black line of clay that you roped and put on there and made a design, you can paint in the cells and use translucent clay with ink in it and create a stained glass effect. Ilysa Bierer: So just 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 color clay with the ink. So, just play around with it and you will come out with some neat results. So thanks for joining us today and we hope you join us next time.