You can be as long with the artists who work with alcohol ink and you will see something humorous. They are not similar in their styles but casual, restrained, uncontrollable, excessively minimal, all of them silently rely on the same gimmick. Ffinding our additional info for latest update!

It is not a graceful composition. It is never an undercover brand.

It’s timing.

Speaking more specifically: the number of times when blending solution or alcohol is added is not what matters, but the time.

The first ones are mostly flooding on the surface. It all disperses, colors intermingle and it looks cool five minutes. Then it becomes muddy. Flat. Kind of lifeless.

Professionals wait.

They allowed the ink to dry off partly. Not fully dry. Nor moistening neither too. That clumsy half way position when the sides begin to stick to the surface and the centre is free. That is the magic in it.

Add some isopropyl alcohol at that stage and the reaction is quite different. It does not rub all the stuff off, it provokes the pigment thrown out in these fluttering ripples of soft, organic stuff. You get depth. You get contrast. There are the petal-shaped ones that are said to be hard.

They’re not.

They are simply put in the time.

This happened to me in the most difficult way. Initially, I would still strive to correct the circumstances by pouring more alcohol. More blending solution. More everything. It had made it never easy. The colors were depersonalized. It was as though it were batter into the pan–and when it was in it was out.

One day I was inattentive, however (this is with the phone, actually), and I came back a minute later, and spilled alcohol on semi-dried ink by mistake.

That one was a century better than what I would do.

I do it deliberately since that time.

The other thing that the pros do–they see what the sides do. It is the slight change of the alcohol ink wherein the gloss is lost a little before it is hardened. That’s your window. Forget it and the liquor will lie there. Pound it on the door and it opens.

And this is what people do not wish to hear, it is not consistent.

Humidity changes it. It is falsified with the quality of paper or yupo. The time is changed by the weight of your first drop. There is no formula to learn.

You sort of get a feel of it. Cooking together without any measurement.

At this point the surface is tilted at a slight angle by other artists and alcohol is poured into it. Not to shoot the stream,–to shoot it radically. It composes such long, light, airy graduations, which are not formal yet purposeful.

You will have to test it too soon, and all will slide. O, it is too late, nothing is going on.

It also does not have a restraint factor that is dealt with appropriately. Professionals stop sooner. They do not check poking the piece on the ground because they can. When that opportune flower comes they abandon it.

That is the actual discipline.

Such overworking is required of alcohol ink. It is virtually pleading to it.

However, the best of them are definitely not continuous interventions but rather one or two timely interventions.

This is why when your work appears to be flat or chaotic as such then it is probably not your tools or colors.

It’s your timing.

And as it strikes it takes a couple of bad pieces. That’s normal.