Trying Out Fluid Art (Again) on Canvas

If you follow this blog, you’ll know that towards the end of last year, I tried making fluid art. You can read about that experience here. It was something I’d never done before and I didn’t really have the materials for, so I decided to improvise by using acrylic paint and PVA glue. It kind of worked, but didn’t create the same effect you normally see, so I decided I would give it another go. I still didn’t have the right tools for the job (my research tells me I should be using pouring medium), but again, I thought I would make do with what I had already and see how it went.

My strategy this time was to use matt medium and fluid acrylics. I didn’t mix the two together like perhaps I should have, but instead just poured some matt medium onto paper, moved it around a little, and then dripped the fluid acrylic on in random places. I then tilted the paper to try and get the medium and paint to slide around, before switching to using an old credit card to scrape the paint across the page. I alternated the two techniques until I had produced a pattern I was reasonably happy with.

I tried this out on paper first a few times, with varying success, until I decided that I might as well just go for it on canvas!

As a picture, compositionally, I don’t think this has worked, but in terms of creating fluid art, I think it has been a reasonable success. Of course, I imagine using pouring medium and doing it the ‘right’ way probably produces better results and relies less on being lucky, but for a first attempt using what I had to hand, I’m not disappointed. Obviously, I realise now that I should have been more thoughtful about where I was putting the paint down in the first instance and then being more careful about moving the paint around, so that I created an image that looked good. Nevertheless, it was not a bad test and I think it turned out alright.

It is worth noting, if you decided to try this out (and I’m not sure if this is even relevant or not, just an observation) that I primed the paper and canvas that I used the orange colourway on with gesso, but not the two green ones. I think the two orange ones came out looking better, so this might be a factor, or it could be that the different colour paints worked differently, or maybe I was more careful, I don’t know, I just thought it might be worth mentioning!