Fun with Yupo Paper and Dye-na-flow with Celia

Hey everyone! 

Today I’m trying out Yupo paper with some Dye-na-flow inks. For anyone who hasn’t heard of it or used it, Yupo paper is a synthetic plastic-y paper with a super smooth finish. The inks are meant for fabric and silk painting but I thought that would blend together really well on Yupo (mineral paper would probably work for this too).

On my first one I just used a brush to blend some colors together. Using different techniques/strokes with the brush make a lot of different outcomes!

When it was half dry, I blew on the ink to make even more cool patterns. It turned out pretty cool but also made me very dizzy. It almost looks like coral, which gave me more ideas…

On another page, I laid down a few blues and brushed them with long strokes. While it was still wet, I splattered magenta and yellows by tapping the brush a few inches over the paper. They sort of spread out and blend in a really cool way! 

As it started drying, the splatters only spread in parts of it or where the first splatters were put down and it all blended in a really neat way. 

After that, I taped down a coral stencil - this one is fire coral. I used a baby wipe to rub off the ink, since the Yupo paper doesn’t absorb it, it comes right off! Any kind of slightly damp cloth/paper towel would work to wipe it off. 

 The stencil didn’t fit over the whole paper, but I just moved it over, then connected the areas by rubbing off more ink with a wet paint brush. It’s a lot easier to make a really neat edge like this than with paint!

For my next experiment, I'm going to try to make a galaxy. I started with a bunch of “Midnight Blue,” and splattered some magenta and turquoise in it. 

I sprayed some alcohol on it, which made a neat texture. 

I pushed the ink around with a paintbrush and splattered some more colors on it. As it was drying, I used a paper towel to absorb some big puddles of dark ink to even out the colors. It came out really cool! 

Once it dried all the way I added more dark blue ink around the outside to create emphasis in the middle. The white Dye-na-flow wasn’t very opaque, so I made a lot of dots with my favorite white gel pen. 

I surfed through Pinterest and google for some sort of quote but a lot of them were really long, too cheesy, or too edgy… so I thought I’d use one of the Tam’s inspiration stencils. The “Stardust" from the "Believe" stencil fits perfectly! I used the same technique as the coral stencil and fixed it up with a little damp brush and some more ink around the outside. 

There's so much you can create with ink on this paper! I bet it would make all sorts of awesome skies, water, leaves, and flowers, maybe even fire… or just throw your favorite colors on for an awesome background! 

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