It's been a few days since my last pour for a variety of reasons.
- I've been spending time with the garden.
- Been waiting on squeeze bottles, which finally arrived earlier this week.
- I'm running out of floetrol.
Everything combined, I figured it's best to wait it out and try to find the right time to get my paint on which finally happened yesterday while I was waiting for my midwife.
I don't know what it was. Maybe I was super rusty, maybe it's my paint mix ratio, maybe not enough paint or my pour mix is too watered down because I'm almost of of floetrol but I just wasn't happy with any of the pours.
After many, MANY scrapes, I ended up with this piece.
🙄😣
Pouring Mediums
There's plenty of different pouring mediums out there. There's the super expensive liquitex one, the floetrol which isnt really meant to be a pouring medium but it works so well as one, then there's the home made mixes with PVA glue and water, and water with dish soap.
Currently my favourite pouring medium mix is Floetrol + Water mixed at 1:1:1 with no silicone added.
My fave pouring recipe
1 part paint : 1 part floetrol : 1 part distilled water
It's been great and works brilliantly but hot damn floetrol is expensive and I'm going through it like water.
Thus the experiments.
I watched a few videos yesterday of people using various combinations of water + glue and water + dish soap ~ but all of them used silicone and I don't want to use silicone.
Adding silicone means I need to clean my canvas several times after so my varnish would stick. It could also affect the time I need to wait before I can varnish. As it is, with my current mix, I've been able to varnish the next day as long as the canvas was dry.
I decided to conduct my own experiment using my own recipes without silicone.
I made three different pouring mediums and mixed them with my paint.
Once mixed I poured each of them in the same order on a canvas.
Here are the results and my thoughts on how each recipe went.
100ml Glue + 50ml Water
By far the most fluid of the recipes I really thought out of all of them this would work out best but as you can see no cells and the mix did not move across the canvas as well as I thought it would.
I scraped the above result and poured again thinking it could have been my pouring method that let the mix down but no. This result was worse than the first imho.
100ml Glue + 50ml Floetrol + 25ml Water
Cells!! I'm guessing this is the floetrol doing it's thing. Not as cell-y as I would like but it's a much better result than the glue + water.
Also this flowed across the canvas a lot better when I hit it with the hair dryer.
100ml Glue + 25ml Floetrol + 25ml Water
More cells in this one but they're tiny. Again, I believe this is the floetrol at work.
Final Thoughts
All the recipes need more water. If the hair dryer can't move the paint across with ease then definitely it needs more water.
I need to conduct more experiments with mixes. Perhaps add detergent to the water + glue mix to see if that would help with cells.
I also might add silicone to these mixes to see if that would help the results. As much as I don't want to I just want to see if it will make a big difference.
That's pretty much it. Back to the drawing board for me today. Wish me luck!!