Acrylic Pouring Mini Canvas Gifts

Something I’ve been dying to try for about a year is acrylic pouring and yesterday I finally got around to setting it up and having a go.  I first saw this technique demonstrated by Dina Wakley in her new product release video last June and it just looked like so much fun.  FYI this is not a new technique but this product range from Ranger and Dina Wakley is new and I like how they make it really accessible for crafters.

Here is the end result.  The big one is A5 and the four little ones are roughly A6.  I really really wanted to make some BIG canvases as I have several that I wanted to finally use for something, but since I know this is messy, I decided to start small and build up to it.  Well I’m glad I did because this was VERY messy, even with gloves and newspaper and everything dripping into a big box, it was crazy messy lol.

So what is acrylic pouring?  In a nutshell you pour some acrylic paint over a surface, tilt it to make it move and cover the full surface, wait for it to dry and that’s it.  However, you need to use some kind of pouring medium with the paint to make it do what you want it to do and you can use other mediums to affect the appearance eg create more cells with Dina Wakley Cell Creator.  I used Liquitex Pouring Medium mixed with my acrylic paints with a 3:1 medium to paint ratio and added the cell creator to it (1-2 drops) and mixed it all together.  For my first attempt I used Dina Wakley Heavy Body paint, in four different colours, then mixed each colour separately with the pouring medium and cell creator before tipping them all into the same container and then pouring over my canvas.  Once it hits the canvas, the colours start to spread and blend or separate, making really amazing patterns and if you use cell creator (or similar) then you can watch the tiny individual cells popping up.

Here’s a close up of one of the first ones I did.  I actually liked how this one turned out so I decided to keep it (some of the others I ended up doing a second pour over the top!) however if you look closely you can see some little pink dots of pink paint that never got mixed in.  I checked the paint and it does seem to have some little lumps in it.  But anyway these imperfections are minimal so I kept this one as I love all the tiny cells created on it.  Then I tried the pouring technique with some really cheap acrylic paint that was very runny and actually I had thought of throwing it out because it was too runny, but guess what, it was perfect for this exercise!  So if you have any old acrylic paint you want to use up, why not try it with this technique.

These are the four smaller canvases that I am giving as gifts for some crafty friends.  I bought some tiny wooden easels to display them on and they look super cute!

And if you are interested in trying this technique, watch this video below.