Don’t nudge it too far, you can end up with weird buckles and bumps on your surface. Sometimes I’m ok with that. If it’s not too thick, you can correct it with a clear pour.
Basic Luminous Pour Painting
It’s an exciting, liberating way to create beautiful, movement-filled, luminous art.
It forces you to let go of total control and let the medium and the pigments frolic and play to make some flippin cool stuff.
Of course, the more you explore it, the more control you have – but never like you would with a brush.
That’s a good thing. Free up.
Let’s Get Started
Basic Supplies (general list, detailed information to follow):
- Poly tarp (heavy duty plastic can be found at Lowes or Home Depot)
- Gloves
- Plexiglas scraps (for practicing)
- Cradleboard
- Gesso (brand suggestion: Not fussy about this)
- Liquitex Pouring Medium (THIS IS MAGIC STUFF – WOOT WOOT. )
- Acrylic paints (recommend: Golden Fluid Acrylics or Liquitex Soft Body)
- Small plastic containers for mixing/storing variety of colors
- Dixicups (optional, but used for propping pieces off table)
- Tub to collect paint drippings
Colors:
First, pick your color choices for this painting. I’m providing some of mine as examples.
Paint Group Suggestions
For your first Luminous Pour Paintings, I’d suggest picking a group from the list below; a few light, transparent paints, one or two darker, and a few metallic or interference colors. In your first paintings, try to aim for a more light than dark, create movement with a smaller amount of the darks, and highlights of opaque or metallic or interference paints. Play with one group of colors before moving on so that you can start to get a feel for it
Let go of the need to be perfect!
Warm:
- Quinacridone gold – or transparent yellow iron oxide
- Quinacridone burnt orange
- Mixed blacks/brown (ex Anthraquinone blue and Quinacridone burnt orange)
- Interference gold and/or orange (mixed fairly thickly, but evenly)
- Any metallic gold or bronze
Cool Toward Purple:
- Pthalo blue (blue shade)
- Mixes of degrees of blue (blue shade) or Anthraquinone blue and Quinacridone magenta
- Quinacridone magenta on its own, or pushed a bit with pthalo or anthraquinone blue, or shaded down with a touch of pthalo green
- Opaques – white, or interference blue, violet, or even a little gold
- Mixed black from Quinacridone magenta and Pthalo green (may need a touch of transparent iron oxide to push it)
Blue, sea tones:
- Pthalo blue (green shade) some lighter, some darker
- Pthalo green, blue shade
- Transparent Yellow Iron Oxide
- Transparent Red Iron Oxide or Quinacridone Burnt Orange
- Mixed black from Pthalo Blue and Quinacridone Burnt Orange
- Metallic golds or bronzes
- Interference gold or green
TEST IT OUT:
Snag a Plexiglas panel and some gloves. Put the gloves on.
Pick a light and a dark paint from the group you choose. Pour three half dollar size puddles of your light, three quarter sizes of your dark. Squiggle some metallic or interference pain around.
Start tilting. Don’t be afraid of diagonal tilts either, or reversing a tilt. The idea here is to see what the paint does, what happens when you tilt it sharply or lightly, how they flow together, stick stubbornly, mingle, drip it off the sides, make a general mess. You can’t ruin it – this is practice.
Find what you like, (or liked, as it probably changed as you tilted it) and think about what you did to make that happen.
Stuff You Will Want to Know
Mixing Your Paint with Pouring Medium
Mixing can sometimes be the most time-consuming step, but if you do it right, your piece will be better in the end.
- Carefully pour some medium into a jar or cup, then add a few drops of your pigment, then more medium, and more drops. Pour carefully to avoid a lot of bubbles. This medium can froth and you can end up with a frothy bubbly painting instead of the resin-like surface this medium is meant to help you create.
- Start stirring with a plastic spoon, lifting the mix from the bottom up. If you swirl from above, you risk introducing a lot of air, creating bubbles.
- About the bubbles – Never shake pouring medium! If you do, you have to wait for it to settle down before it’s usable.
Getting the color you want:
This medium is almost milky translucent. It won’t be when it dries – it’ll be clear. It makes your colors look lighter. This isn’t yet the forum for a lot of color theory, but these tips will help:
- Mix black from lots of drops of transparent paints
- Alizarin Crimson + Pthalo Green
- Anthaquinone Blue + Quinacridone Burnt Orange (My Fav)
- They won’t look black or brown – test it on white paper or the plastic tarp.
How much do I mix up?
More than you think you will need. You always need more than you think. Store leftovers in an airtight container.
____
OK let’s make a beautiful mess!
In your first paintings, try to aim for more light than dark in the beginning, create movement with the darks, and highlights of opaque or metallic or interference paints. Play with one group of colors before moving on so that you can start to get a feel for it.
Let go of the need to be perfect. You are learning.
Gloves on!
- Pour your main light first – this is the most paint you will use with this beginning project. For your first project, don’t over thing where it will end up – just pour where you’d like it to start.
- Add another medium color if you want where you want
- It’s a fun time to put in a bit of interference or metallic if you like that stuff
- Using small tilts, tilt to the side, tilt it away from you, and tilt to the other side if you want, and then tilt toward you to spread it around a bit. It’s ok if some of it runs off the side.
Add Your Darks
- Don’t be symmetrical about this!
- Choose where you want to start your darks. Try to avoid too much symmetry. Symmetry kills motion. Balance is good, but achieve it without doing one there, one here, one there, one here …
- Add puddles or swoops of your blacks, smaller browns perhaps next to, in or near them, and then add some small areas of bronze and/or interference gold and/or metallic bright gold … these are just starting tips. You can totally experiment one you get the concept down.
- If you want to lighten an area, you can pour clear pouring medium in that area.
- Note—Adding anything to an area will push the paint next to it away a bit, in general, and even more so when you tilt it toward that paint. Sometimes you may want to do that on purpose.
Time to Really Tilt that Puppy
- Try not to do exactly the same order of tilt as before. You can try a little tilt at first, at this point can tilt it the other way if you don’t like it and a lot of it will correct itself. Diagonal tilts are often effective at this stage. You can also run a gloved finger to mingle some paints together (this is great with bronzes, golds, etc. that like to stick together and float around the top).
- You might want to get brave and do a big tilt or a diagonal tilt – or tilt and turn and tilt and do little titls. Stop and look at it once in a while. I had no idea how often and long I just stopped and stared at a pour painting in process until I started working on YouTube demonstration videos. I think I’ll cut those parts out.
- Try to remember where your darks may have anchored themselves to the board – you may only see a ghost of them now through this glue-like stuff, but you will see them when it all dries and it can really change the composition.
- Don’t worry too much, through, you can do another layer later if it isn’t quite there.
- While it’s still wet, you can squeeze, drop or pour your mixed paint into holes that are left on the surface, use a gloved finger to encourage paint to meld together or swirl, or to shore up funky edges and gaps. You might want to use that gloved finger or the back of a spoon to soften up the edges if you do that, or to bring paint out to the edge of the painting.
- If it’s started to dry, don’t add more paint. You can do a little of this later, or do a completely new pour on top as long as it’s all dry (wait a couple of days to make sure … unless it still looks milky, and that means waiting even longer)
Snowflake Wood
Acrylic – 76cm x 76cm
£1,050.00 Free UK Delivery
Tranquility and Peace.
Acrylic – 80cm x 30cm
£190.00 Free UK Delivery
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£664.00 Free UK Delivery
