I’ve been buying mine at Jerry’s Artarama — they often have great sales and are a long time local art store in town that I love supporting. The alcohol inks I’ve primarily been getting are Artfinity because they are Jerry’s employees’ favorite and generally a better price per mL than the more popular Tim Holtz ones (Artfinity is 25 mL per bottle, Tim Holtz is 15 mL, prices are about the same per unit). Form factor is a little more annoying with Artfinity because they are tippy. I’ve been thinking about making a little holder jig for them. This matters because when you’re working with them, you often want to have the lids unscrewed but sitting on top to keep it covered so you can grab it and use them quickly (remember, alcohol based so evaporates and dries quickly).
This post shows a pretty wide variety of them in use from some recent projects — Share your projects - Gift Edition 🎁 - #4 by valerie. The deep blue background is a single layer but two different blues applied together with a felt pad. The millennium falcon was done with metallic alcohol ink (as well as a few other parts in the bird ones) so it isn’t as translucent and hides the wood grain more. The thing that I love the most about alcohol inks is that you get vibrant colors saturated into the wood without losing the beauty of the wood grain and they are quick to apply and dry. They are FANTASTIC on curly maple as you can see from that lobster and cardinal birds.
I might do a demo sometime soon showing what I’ve learned thus far and giving people an opportunity to play with them. They are a lot of fun and work well on many different mediums. I’m a big fan 