DIY alcohol ink: Mica Magic

hey alec from druid dice here today we're going to be going over how to make your own custom mica alcohol inks using alcohol and mica so grab yourself an ipa wait no grab yourself some isopropyl alcohol and your favorite mica and let's get started [Music] all right so if we're going to talk about mica powders we should really know what we're doing and take a moment to understand what mica powder really is so mica powder is a mind ore that comes from a lot of different metal types mostly so titanium oxides iron oxides and etc now most of these are going to be formed in a 15 micron powder but it's not completely uniform you can get anywhere from like 50 to 200 micron all the way up to a thousand micron if you really want something not chunky there are synthetics out there that aren't mined and they have their positives but the biggest drawback for me personally is they're so uniform that you don't get the really pretty natural swirl and depth that you do with the traditional organic mica powder so when you're sourcing your mica powder it's important to keep in mind of a couple things micron size coloration and last but not least price because mica powders can get really expensive if you're looking for some really beautiful budget mica powders that aren't gonna break your bank but still do a lot of good work check us out at druidics.com we have a full line of druid dust with just about every color of the rainbow now that said when it comes to mica powders the reason we want to really focus on the micron is the bigger it is the heavier it is and the heavier it is the more it's going to sink so keep that in mind as we go through and you're building your alcohol ink mica combination because the heavier saturation of the alcohol ink as we get to the point where we're making it you're going to run into issues where you'll have a lot of excess sinkage while some of it floats but we'll cover that in the next step let's go grab our ipa all right now here oh that's gone bad see ah here we go wait a second so you don't want ipa as in the alcoholic beverage what you want is isopropyl alcohol here it is so you want as high of a percentage as you can get today i'm going to be using 91 isopropyl alcohol the other percentage part and that is water and we want as little water in a resin as possible so keep that in mind when you're trying to source it a lot of pharmacies will have 90 or higher but if you can't source a high percentage like that 70 can work you just have to be really careful because you're now adding a lot of water to the equation which can cause resin to not cure properly and nothing's worse than pulling a bunch of goopy dice that said when it comes to alcohol you can also use denatured alcohol or mineral spirits those will work as well the important part is you just want to use the lesser concentration if you end up having to use those since their saturation is going to be a bit lower as well as they'll interfere with the resin as well so if you are using those make sure you do about half as much as i show in our mixing steps so now that i've got our alcohol let's go ahead and get to it so we've got our ipa now with the isopropyl alcohol you're really going to want to make sure you have a proper device in order to actually get it to your dice mold in your resin so pouring it out of a cup definitely isn't the best way to go you can use a toothpick but i highly recommend using either a pipette or a syringe and today's example we'll be using a syringe i recommend going with one that's got a rather large tip so something that's like 24 gauge or more these particular ones are like oral medicine syringes can pick them up off of pretty much any big box store nowadays but i'll have a link below on what i use for both syringes and pipettes so that said let's go ahead and get down here and i'll show you exactly how to mix it up so we've got our mica powder that we've just carelessly spilled all over a cup for mixing in our syringe for keeping it and our isopropyl alcohol so the first thing you're going to want to do is get your mica powder and i will usually recommend starting with about oh a teaspoon so just about like so okay and then gotta take your isopropyl alcohol and if you have a separate cup on the side you can use that if you're using a syringe or a pipette handy dandy it actually has your graduated measurements on it ah on my case though my pa is running a bit on the low side so let's see if we can do this without making a mess nope that's gonna end in despair so we're gonna go ahead and use the old cap trick so i'm gonna pour into the cap and you really don't need a lot you need like two milliliters at most there you are see so that's a pretty heavy amount but i'm making a big batch if you were make using a pipette and just doing this in a one shot then you definitely wouldn't need that much but i'm i want to make enough to save for later so you can see as soon as you get your alcohol ink in there excuse me as soon as you get your alcohol in there you can see it already starts to mix in with your mica now the greater the mica powder granule size the larger the um the less likely it is going to mix this stuff is ultra fine so this is 50 and smaller so it mixes pretty much instantly on its own you can already see it's got a really nice metallic sheen that we're going to be taking advantage of now this is also super thin so i'm going to add another teaspoon of our mica swish it around and you really want to get it so with the ultra fine or anything anything under 100 um you're running into where as you swish it it should pretty much all be absorbed by the alcohol ink you can see it's still really liquid but now you see how it just kind of got a little bit more thickness to it so this is almost where i want it to be so i'm going to take about half as much as i added my previous times and into the mixture you go you really want to push it to its full saturation point now keep in mind this is evaporating while you're doing this so it's important to work quickly and i would call that a really heavy saturation so when you get to this point you're going to take your tool and then you really want to make sure you're scraping it and getting all of that beautiful mica down and mixed in now we're going to take our syringe and place it in and absorb it up if you're using a pipette you'll do the same method don't worry about getting air in there because we're just gonna flip it over so don't worry about the excess air we're just gonna go ahead and evacuate it out being mindful not to cause a little volcano mica boom there we go and now we are all set so next step just like we would normally we're going to go ahead and get a dice mold all prepped and then we'll make some beautiful dice we are all set up and ready to go i've got my resin here ready to mix you'll notice this is a bit yellow it's because we're using a polyurethane resin you can see i've got my mix here and the bottom all that alcohol has evaporated away but we've kept it in the syringe so you can see we've got some separation so we're just going to put our finger on it give it a good shake just like if you were using an alcohol ink such as ranger's mixative line got some heavy pigmentation and now we're all good to go again so first things first we're going to mix this together beautiful beautiful you can see it's starting to clear up now remember every resin is different so pay attention to what you're using and be sure to follow the safety data sheets of that resin okay so i think we're just about all mixed up so we're ready here for this particular set of dye i'm going to add just a little bit of coloration as well with our alcohol ink and in that form i'm just going to be doing a little bit of sparkle nothing too easy i just want to add a little bit of shimmer throughout the entire die and now we have a nice glitter sparkle joy so we're gonna go ahead and pour into our mold now for the particular technique we're going for today you want to fill it about three-fourths of the way full much like with our petri technique we're following those same steps from our petri so we're filling it up the majority of the way leaving room for excess so we can cap and make sure we don't run to cure inhibition issues and remember that's extremely important if you are working with a higher water content alcohol go and get some of that excess out of there so now i'm going to take this i always shake it again before use we'll test off the mold to make sure we don't have any sort of yep see i had a lot of build up there so now we're going to take it we're just doing the smallest amount we can here perfect okay so now we've got our alcohol ink in and looking beautiful we're gonna let that evaporate a little bit with aida some fuego now alcohol is flammable so you want to make sure you're being careful and balancing because if you're not you'll see you make fire we want to avoid the fire so just we're trying to help it evaporate now we're going to pour on the edge so that way the excess resin spills into the mold and now we're just helping it along here i want to make sure i get good spread and coverage this polyurethane is extremely on the light side and for this particular effect i want to make sure we're getting it because we're going for you got a really like metallic-y smoky mica here and so i'm going for like a really like dark kind of murder smoke ninja vibe and then we're gonna go ahead and line everything up this looks good i'm gonna flip right on there beautiful and now we are ready to put this into the pressure pot our residents had enough time to cure so now we're going to be depressurizing and popping the pot and seeing exactly what we got fingers crossed we got something beautiful it looks good i mean the pressure pod insert looks good go ahead and come on in and we'll take a closer look here all right so looks nice all right got a little bit of flashing on here we need to take off no big deal now this polyurethane resin does have a really fast cure time of an hour which is why i'm using it and you can see because of that i've got a little couple bubbles that snuck their way in this stuff should be vacuumed but that's all right yeah this is exactly what we were going for well this set came out absolutely beautiful these dice came out awesome got really beautiful coloration for that nice silver smoky dark feel vibe i was going for with this particular mica powder and on top of that we've got some really nice defined plumes that came from using the petri style effect that you just really couldn't get with the mica powder on its own so i went heavy on this particular die set but if you're doing this at home you can rather than using a syringe or pipette you can also use a toothpick or other tool to do just a really small application and you can even ink sync it using blanco blanco just like you would with a traditional petri if you really want to nail that petri effect but have the diversity and really nice color swirl and play that you get with traditional mica powders so i appreciate you taking the time to do this tutorial with me happy casting and we'll see you around by the way we're going to be at planet con kansas city from april 22nd through the 24th that weekend there's gonna be some amazing guests there like adam savage and so many other amazing artists and makers i definitely recommend grabbing a pass checking out the con and visiting us at our booth we're gonna have dice sets for sale as well as other special items you can only get through our con events so if you like tabletop gaming comics and some cosplay definitely come join us i'll leave a link to tickets below for planet con and hope to see you there happy dice making you

Channel: Druid Dice

Views: 16,981

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Id: x6GL7ThVtaM

Length: 17min 21sec (1041 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 26 2022