YouTube is a sneaky beast! One minute you’re looking at a video that teaches you how to do something and they next thing you know is it’s two in the morning, and you’ve just watched your 15th straight “surprise military homecoming” video, every video from songs that were popular during your senior year of high school, or worse, your 200th cat video.
During one of these trips through the black hole, I stumbled on “acrylic flow painting”. This is a process where regular craft paint is thinned, sloppily poured together in a cup (with a few drops of silicone, if you’d like, to make “cells” within the paint), then literally poured over a piece of canvas. It is incredibly sloppy, extremely wasteful, and absolutely fascinating! Some of the finished pieces are nothing I’d hang on my wall, but some of them are absolutely stunning! I figured that was cool on a flat surface, but what would it look like on a round surface? I kept clicking… Eventually, I found people that were using this approach to paint flower pots and one guy who was using it to color bowls that he had made.
YAHTZEE!
I went to Wal-Mart for cheap acrylic paint, Home Depot for a bottle of Flotrol, the Dollar Store for some of those cheap plastic condiment bottles, and Amazon for a bottle of 100% silicone in liquid form. While I waited on Amazon’s two day shipment to arrive, I went down to the shop and hastily finished turning some small bowls that I could experiment on. Once the UPS man made his delivery, I had all my supplies in hand and was ready to begin.
The results are below. I don’t particularly like any of these, since none of them look anything like what appears when paint is poured on a flat canvas. Gravity gets in the way and everything “cool” just kinda slides down the side of the bowl and onto the kitchen table. I did learn a tremendous amount about mixing the paints, how to better prepare the bowl for accepting the paint, how NOT to apply the paint to the bowl, and how best to clean up a whole blob of messy, thinned, silicone infused paint. I will certainly try this again, but most likely it’ll be reserved for the outer rim on a wide rimmed platter, since that would be a much flatter surface.
