Having a little fun with my crazy "pouring" results

by Kathy Garvey

YouTube is a veritable feast of new ideas and tutorials. I watched about 20 on the technique of acrylic pouring recently and decided to give it a try.

I gathered canvas, cheap acrylics in primary colors of magenta, cyan and yellow, some glazing medium (which I hoped would work as pouring medium since I couldn't find that), white and black acrylics, paper cups, a drying rack, various cheap tools for stirring and scraping, and ordered silicone online.

After mixing what I hoped was the right consistency of everything, I drizzled my primary colors randomly on the canvas, put white and black at either end and made a pitiful attempt to pull the end colors over the others and create "cells." Below is my crazy result.

It obviously takes experience to know how to not overdo this technique. And, now I need to wait a few days for it to dry and see if I can do anything with this 12x12 canvas. But this isn't a sad story about my pouring results. 

I saw little sections of it that I liked, so I took photos.

And then I took the first of those photos into Photoshop.

After experimenting with several of my seamless custom patterns as overlays, I used one created for a recent Matisse contest at Spoonflower in Soft Light mode. That was the one! After more experimenting and filtering I liked the results (shown below) enough to consider printing it to fabric sometime in the future. It would make a wild outfit, or pillows, or sections for a crazy quilt! 

And then I noticed parts of that file that I really liked and decided to copy selections in a ratio of 7x5 to new files and scale them to fit. 

When printed to card stock, they'll make a set of four greeting cards. 

Later, I started working again with Photoshop and the second photo from my pour to create a few prints and posters. 

So whether I end up with a great "poured" canvas or not, I'm happy with all of the secondary results - future fabrics, cards, prints and posters. And, I still have numerous photos from my first pour to "play" with. 

If you are interested in trying acrylic "pouring" I recommend videos by Caren Goodrich on YouTube. They're some of my favorite and she makes the preparation and instructions very clear.