Golden workshop on pouring & marbling acrylic paint

Barbara de Pirro is the Golden rep/artist in Western Washington and she does regular workshops & lectures at art stores in the area.  I've attended a couple of her lectures/demos in Bellevue at Daniel Smith so when this class came up in her newsletter, I jumped on it despite the drive from Bellingham to Seattle for a 5 hour workshop.  And it was well worth it.

We started with a demo/talk about the different mediums to use in pouring acrylics and why it was a bad idea to do some of the things seen in various YouTube videos on the subject.  (Short answer:  some of things added can break down the acrylics over relatively short periods of time.)  We each got a folder of info about the materials and she demonstrated several techniques and styles of pours.  Then we got turned loose with our own bag of mediums and *huge* bags of fluid & high flow paints to experiment. (We got to take the sample sizes of the mediums home but could borrow the paints.)  I love marbling so I tried that first.  Here's my most successful attempt at using marbling techniques with acrylics on canvas board..

Calling this one twinkling stars

This was actually my second attempt, the first one turned to mud as I tried to swirl the paint around. But the one above is going to be the starting point for my next batch of experiments with this technique.  I'll be using the results in two ways.  First, I can silkscreen dancers on top of them and voila, I'm doing paintings.  Second, I can get a good photo of the marbled acrylic and print it on fabric and then make a quilt version with fabric dancers collaged on top.  This will give me a direct comparison of my two choices right now for creating small dancer pieces.  As part of my current process of figuring out what parts of creating give me joy, this direct comparison of paint vs fabric should be quite informative.

I started with my basic blue & yellow palette which is what I favor for the dancers.  Darker blue, teal, golden yellow and bright yellow were my starting point.  And if you don't put down a layer of acrylic first, when you drop the colors on a canvas board and swirl them, well, here's some mud.

Note how the blue and yellows combined to give me some streaks of green.  There's only a bit of recognizable swirls on the left but otherwise, an epic fail.  I am really pleased that I so quickly diagnosed the problem and corrected to get the twinkling stars above.

Having one success and one failure, I then attempted to get the swirling marbling that I like so much in my traditional marbling work.  I did two different attempts, adding more blues and some greens to my palette.  The bottom blue one was an attempt at sky horizon and the second was adding more colors and seeing how well the swirling worked with greater contrast.

These satisfied me on the marbling techniques.  I feel I've got a handle on what works and I will be working further with it in the next month or so.  The rest of the class, I spent playing with the pouring technique and creating acrylic skins which was all kinds of very messy, drippy fun.   As I play further with the skins I created, I'll share what results from those.

Regardless of the future experiments, this was a hugely successful experience for me.  I got into that creative joyful spot and enjoyed myself tremendously.  May you do the same real soon!