Art: First batch of acrylic pour paintings finished

The first batch of paintings we made have sufficiently dried down enough to get clear coated! It can take awhile for all the paint and liquid on the canvas to fully settle down and solidify, so we let them rest after being made for at least 24 hours, if not longer when possible. Once we felt confident that they were sufficiently solid we took them outside and gave them generous coats of glossy top coat to protect the paints so the paintings will hold up over time. In person they look absolutely fantastic! The clear coat gives added luminousity and lustre to the colors underneath, making them bright and pearlescent... of course, this makes it harder to photograph them because the same gloss that makes them so lovely to look at refracts the light with a fervor that the lens eats up. Flash drowns it out, and the lighting in our studio tends to cast shadows... trying to capture these photos was a tightrope dance of trying to balance reflective shine against shadow. I don't think I completely nailed it, so the actual shop product photos for when these go live will likely be done differently. To be fair, I did this on my own, and Antho is really the skilled light-tech in the relationship. I can point and snap photos but his years working in his high school theater as a technician really helped him learn lighting in technical ways I'm not yet proficient in. I make do with what I've got, though, and tutorials and things have been of exceptionally great use. I swear, there's a youtube tutorial for everything!    

I didn't consider the paintings full complete until after they've dried and been coated, as I wouldn't consider them sellable prior to that. The paints can settle and new aspects revealed, too, during the drying process so there's still more to discover after you've set the painting down post-pour. I have to say that I think these turned out pretty darn nice for being our very first try at this technique. Responses on Instagram have been positive, too, so we're excited to be delving deeper into this! Similar to tie-dye, they always come out so completely different. We used the same 8-10 colors for all of these paintings but the ratios and spread made each painting completely it's own. Pretty groovy. They also react pretty well to changing light colors, as Antho cycled our light through the color spectrum and each shade would make different portions pop out at us. 

Pretty groovy, man.

More photos below!

Art: Acrylic Pour paintings, round three

And we're back at it with the pour painting!

Man, I love doing this stuff! I've been so obsessed with it for ages and never realized just how easy it really was to do. A lot of the videos and tutorials I had read on creating the acrylic pour texture needed required expensive supplies you either order online or pick up from an art supply store and neither of those options was especially appealing or felt readily accessible to me. A small bottle of official acrylic pour medium starts at about $8, and is probably only good for a handful of paintings... now, don't get me wrong, the medium exists for a reason and it's made to interact positively with the paints and dry with a particular texture, so it's absolutely worth buying if you're extremely serious about your paintings. If you buy a large bottle (say a gallon or so) you get a better price by weight, but it's still far from what I'd call "cheap". And that's ok- it's a professional tool for professional painters, and though as an artist I could lament the cost of art supplies until the sun finally burns itself out, I understand the need for quality tools- and that quality often comes at a cost. 

But let's be real, guys. I'm an artist, and while I'm not outright starving (eating eggs on toast right now, actually, one of my favorite budget breakfasts), I'm not exactly loaded, either. I've gotta work within the confines of my quite constrictive budget. Since we're just now starting to experiment with this technique, it didn't seem practical to drop $50 on a gallon of paint-diluter when we also have to buy the paints and canvases with no guarantee on how well we'll like the results. It can be intimidating diving into new things. Believe you me, I get that. 

So for these, we opted for the dirty pour method. Instead of buying expensive pouring medium we opted for a gallon of simple old glue, which was about $10-11 at our local Wal-mart. Of course, since it's not a medium necessarily intended for these purposes the results may be a little off from what would be achieved using the much more expensive medium. We've been happy with our results, however, and to be fair we've been experimenting with using different silicone products in the process, too, so any textural weirdness could be attributed as much to that as the glue. Personally, I'm happy with how they've all turned out. You can judge for yourself after looking at the photos below~