Messy Monday – Cheap paint and used canvases!

Is it eggs on a blue plate special, or a weather satellite image?

So, I made this last Thursday. I’ve been watching YouTube videos on pour paintings, and decided I wanted to try it for myself. My first efforts involved somewhat expensive materials – pouring medium, mid-grade acrylic paints, clean new canvas. That initial experiment turned out… okay. It was sort of blobby and not very interesting to look at. For my second attempt, I went with cheaper materials – craft paint, synthetic oil and school glue from Dollar Tree. That experiment went a bit better, but I made the mistake of picking paints that were too similar in color to really make an impression when they separated out on the canvas. I just ended up with a big muddle of green, for the most part.

Then I decided to try this one. I used an old canvas from a failed Mod Podge project, and added nothing but water to the paints. I made sure to use high contrasting colors, alternating between white, dark blue, bright yellow, and mid blue. There is a touch of gold paint in there, but it shows up more as shading of the other colors than as a bright pop of color. Beyond that, all I did was use an old heat gun to make some of the cells of color appear on the canvas.

I’ve got a couple more used canvases, including one big one that I really screwed up a while back. I bought measuring cups from the Dollar Tree to mix the paint in. I need to make a box bigger than the canvas I want to paint, so that when I pour layers of paint, I’ve got something to catch all the excess. I’ll probably line it with foil tape and lay freezer paper on top of that, in case the excess paint dries into any interesting skins. We’ll see!