Discover the Effects of Adding Alcohol to Stamp Ink With This Background Technique

Here is a simple background technique that uses stamp inks and rubbing alcohol, therefore “drunken.”

What makes it cool is that uses metallic ink and the shine ends up looking like it’s floating on top.

I think this would be an easy technique for card making, tho I’ll show you at the end how I used it for an art journal page.

• Glossy paper (or paper painted with a gloss medium)

• Pigment stamping inks in various colors

• Metallic pigment ink

• Rubbing alcohol

First, I chose three colors of the inks that were complimentary.

I also needed a metallic ink color so I chose silver.

I took my first color of ink and sort of smooshed it around my glossy cardstock. Using glossy paper is important because you won't get the same effect if use regular paper.

I did this with all three of my colors minus the metallic...

At this point, I grabbed the spray bottle of rubbing alcohol I put together and sprayed the alcohol all over my paper.

You can see how it blurred and moved the color around:

Once my paper was dry from the alcohol, I smooshed my metallic silver over the other colors:

And then lastly, I sprayed it with alcohol again:

Once its done and dried, you can see what I mean about the metallic particles sort of floating on top and not being uniform in any way:

I made another background using different colors and gold metallic ink:

I also did the technique as a background to an art journal spread:

So what do you all think? Please let me know in the comments if you've tried this one before.

See all my mixed media background techniques to check out and try!