Altered Book in Progress

Using the book Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women by (late) Elizabeth Wurtzel.

Here's what a page looks like masked out but not touched yet looks like:

Painter's tape works pretty well for this. The colored tabs at the top are other pages that are masked out, and the tabs are labeled to remind me what the words are that are masked.

DIY Alcohol Inks with Food Coloring

So it's been a couple years since I updated this blog. Just gonna ignore the elephant in the room that is Covid, 'kay? We'll file it under "Life Happens" and "Good Intentions" and move on...

So I've rediscovered my own creativity and (lol) started organizing the basement (again, lol), and have been working on junk journaling – or at least some sort of hybrid of that and art journals. And since I am still reluctant to go shopping out in the world, and many art supplies that I don't already have are more than I want to spend for something I don't even know I'll be doing a few months from now, I decided to make my own alcohol ink.

I used a set of food coloring I found on Amazon that already had a large number of colors, small perfume mister bottles, and we already had the 91% isopropyl alcohol on hand for 3D printing. (I'll put Amazon links at the end. I am not an affiliate, and earn nothing from the links.)

What I used to make the alcohol inks.

I didn't measure the alcohol, only filled the bottles roughly halfway. The bottles (came in 10-packs, I ordered 2 with the idea that if any were defective I'd have spares, plus extras for whatever) held 10 milliliters. To each of those bottles that now contained about 5mL of alcohol I added 10 drops of food color.

I made a very janky stand to hold the bottles, and carefully labeled each color.

The colors didn't immediately mix, possibly because of the glycerine in the food coloring. Screwing the lid on firmly and keeping my thumb on the cap and giving them all a good shake distributed the color pretty well, but red and pink still have precipitate and need to be shaken before each spritz. (NBD.)

Next I needed to do a color test and see how true and vibrant the colors were. I grabbed a handful of white cardstock and laid them out on my cutting mat to protect the table, and set up more card to catch overspray.

Though I was worried about the red, it's pretty good!
The green is approaching teal, though.

Pink is HOT pink, Grape is like Concord grape juice, and Violet absolutely is.

I think I'd need to add more dye to get true Navy, but it's a nice color.
I didn't expect Black from no more dye than I added and I didn't get it.

Comparing Grass Green to Green, it's easy to see which has more blue, more yellow.
This sheet shows a better representation of Lemon Yellow, and Sunset Yellow is orange.
The Brown color is a nice medium brown.

I am overall quite pleased with this experiment. There are of course many inexpensive alcohol ink sets on Amazon, but the reviews are often mixed. One of the cheaper sets I saw has 16 10mL bottles and 4 of those bottles are white. Not including the white, it has the same number of colors in the same size bottles as the food coloring I bought, for a similar price (the ink is about $1 cheaper as of this writing). BUT, with my 10mL bottles of food coloring, I will be able to make MANY bottles of ink, and I still have some of those spray bottles left over that I can make some custom colors if I want. The only thing I lack that would have made this easier is a pipette to transfer the alcohol into the bottles – that would have been much easier than pouring with a funnel. 

Depending how you count, each bottle of DIY ink cost me between $1.70-2.10 (the higher price factors in the fact that I needed to buy 20 mister bottles to get the 12 I actually needed, the lower price only considers the price per bottle).

Amazon links (not sponsored, no affiliation, no kickbacks – this is what I used):
Mister bottles
Food coloring
Isopropyl alcohol 91%, available from any drugstore

Writing: Life Gets In the Way

In November last year, I participated for the first time in the annual NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) event, using the seed of a story I'd already begun many months before of around 7k words. Since the goal of NaNoWriMo is 50k, that gave me a bit of a head start, which was a good thing, since Thanksgiving really threw a wrench into the last week of the month, and I was unable to get many hours into writing, but I did finish, and I finished with over 51k words of a novel I was proud of.

It was a first draft, of course, and needed revision and editing, but I had finally finished a novel. It was far and away the longest thing I'd ever written before. But more than that, it was the beginning of what will be a series because the story wasn't finished. This book had come to what I felt was a natural conclusion – I told the story I wanted to tell and set things up for more stories to come. The seeds were planted, and all I have to do now is nurture them.

I drew maps, I camp up with cultural events, the concepts of societies that don't yet exist in this book to carry into future ones... and then I took a part-time job. (sigh) Life is a funny old thing.

Since I was in grade school, I've wanted to write. And I did write: terrible short stories I'm pretty sure are lost to history (I hope), bad and angsty teenage poetry (that I do still have), the odd assortment of unpublished essays, blog posts, a published magazine article and essay, two completed children's books in need of illustrations, a self-published nonfiction book (Creating an Heirloom), and any number of works in progress. With this new job and my daughter now out of school, I don't know what my writing life is going to look like.

Years ago, after reading one of Christopher Moore's books, I sent him a very fangirlish email and told him how much I loved his writing. I don't know exactly what I said in the email, but I do remember his reply because it was encouraging: he said he didn't start writing until he was in his 30s (I was in my 20s when I wrote to him). Even with than encouragement, I still sat on my butt for years and did nothing about it. I had hours while The Kid was in school to sit and type furiously, but other things got in my way (namely, me).

So what do I do now?

I'll muddle along as I have, stealing hours where I can for writing, and try to adjust my hours at work to reach some sort of equilibrium between work/home/life. And maybe I'll even get my first novel published someday...

Inktober 2018

I've been wanting to improve my drawing skills, and this year decided to participate in the #inktober challenge on Twitter, and followed the suggested prompts. I'm pretty proud of myself for following through and completing all 31 days.

I learned that I don't much care for using Micron 005 pens for coloring (that's really not what they're for), but they are nice for line work. Most of the illustrations I did do the initial drawing in pencil, then inked it. Some I used a photo reference, some not (some I really should have). I used pencils for color most of the time, and usually used my old Crayola pencils, because I forgot I had the much nicer Prismacolor set I got for Christmas (sitting literally within arm's reach). I like coloring with pencils, because the color is so much softer and more blendable. Anyway.

Here, in one place are all my crude, rude, and in some cases socially unacceptable Inktober ink drawings. I got fairly political and I'm very progressive. Gotta exercise those 1A rights while we still have 'em...

For size reference, the sketchpad I used was this one:

3.5 x 5" Strathmore 300 Series, fine tooth surface

#1 Poisonous, #2 Tranquil

#3 Roasted, #4 Spell [Note: the Greek is thru Google Translate, and I'm sure it's rough]

#5 Chicken [if you don't recognize this, go read this blog post – but pee first]

#6 Drooling

#7 Exhausted, #8 Star

#9 Precious & #10 Flowing

#10 Flowing – if felt like cheating to include two prompts in one, so I did Flowing again

#11 Cruel

#12 Whale

#13 Guarded, #14 Clock

#15 Weak [Mitch O'Connell]

#16 Angular, #17 Swollen

#18 Bottle

#19 Scorched, #20, Breakable

#21 Drain

#22 Expensive, "Ignorance cost more than education..." – Lord Avebury, John Lubbock

#23 Muddy, #24 Chop [Executioner is wearing a pink "pussy" hat.]

#25 Prickly [an unflattering, but not inaccurate, self-portrait]

#26 Stretch, #27 Thunder [my dog, hiding under my desk because of thunder]

#28 Gift, #29 Double

#30 Jolt

#31 Slice

Bonus from 10/2: "In response to a Tor.com article:
'The Peril of Being Disbelieved: Horror Fiction and the Intuition of Women'"