Paint Pouring – An Experiment

Firstly a disclaimer – there is no texture involved in this post!

So I have seen a few videos of paint pouring and the kind of effects that you can get with pouring acrylic paint onto a surface and letting it do it’s thing. I have previously created and sold quite a large number of paintings using a similar technique in the past (see this article for more info) but haven’t done many paintings like that for a while as I have been more focused on using texture.

Anyway, the paint pouring videos I have seen are fantastic and really made me want to give it a try. I will add one below so that you can see the type of thing that I mean, if you haven’t already.

I think the results he gets on these paintings are just awesome – looking at the video he uses a heck of a lot of paint (and a few people!) to get the results. Although I have quite a bit of paint (you could call me a bit of a paint hoarder!) I’m not sure I am quite in this realm.

So, I wanted to give it a try and I mixed up my paints to get ready to go – I had a bunch of small lemonade bottles hanging around which were quite useful for mixing the paint – I think I mixed it about 1 part paint to 1 part water but it was a bit of guesswork.

I had also found that I had a storage box that had bits sticking up where the wheels went which perfectly fit a 40x40cm canvas that I had spare that I wanted to experiment on. This would catch all the excess paint. However, half way through I decided to use my usual technique of putting masking tape around the edges so that I kept most of the paint on the canvas.

Anyway, here is my video of how I got on. I’ve speeded (sped?!) it up 16x the actual speed so that it doesn’t take too long! For a first try it has come out with an interesting pattern even though it is not exactly what I was aiming for. I think a few more tries will be necessary as I wasn’t really happy with the lack of concentric circles (which was kind of what I was aiming for) and I think this was due to a few reasons which I will go into below.

OK – so reasons I think it didn’t turn out as I expected:

• I don’t think I poured enough paint on each pouring
• I think it needs a solid surface not a canvas as the paint tends to pool in the middle a bit
• It may be better to use something that would enable gravity to get the paint onto the medium (like the box used in the video at the top)
• I need to keep experimenting with the consistency of the paint
• I possibly also need to introduce some resin as I think that is what others have used in some of these paintings

So although the resulting painting wasn’t quite what I had in mind,  I thought it was worth sharing this experiment for a few reasons – 1, so that I could come back and know what to do differently next time and 2, so that others can learn from what I did if they want to give it a try.

Update: so the painting sold at the exhibition that I created it for – and I got quite a bit of good feedback on it so I’m happy about that.