"Leon" - Embellishing Acrylic Fluid Art
Acrylics / PVA on canvas, gloss varnish,
50 cm x 50 cm (19 ⅝" x 19 ⅝")
Acrylic pouring is an art form in its own right and can lead to powerful and evocative abstract images. The artist has some influence over what's happening on the canvas, but the unique appeal of fluid art is the great deal of randomness introduced by the process. This is counter to classic painting techniques, where the artist has full control of the process and hence the outcome.
With "Leon" I have attempted a combination of both to reduce the level of abstraction. The painting consists of two separate acrylic pourings and a painting session. This is also the reason why I don't have a video for you today. Even at speed, a video would have been an hour long, and nobody would ever watch it!
Anyway, the underpainting of "Leon" is a run-of-the-mill acrylic pour with silicone oil for some cells. This pour was allowed to unfold completely random and acts as the background layer. You have seen me do this dozens of times in my videos.
I then added a second underpainting with "sandy" metallic paints layered in a cup. As this was to become the lions mane, I took as much control as possible over the flow of the liquid paint, tilting it very carefully to create the desired ovalish shape of the lion's head and mane.
While this sounds easy enough, there is a degree of difficulty involved: with too much paint on the canvas, the paint will skin over and dry unevenly with bumps and cracks. Normally, tilting also serves to remove the excess paint of a pour over the sides of the canvas to prevent such undesirable effects. In this case, I had to control the amount of paint very carefully in order to obtain a specific shape with just enough paint to cover the background layer opaquely.
For the hairy effect of the mane I needed to drive the paint outward in fine streams. For this I used a special blowpipe set fashioned from surgical tubing and brass pipes:
Human breath directed by such a blowpipe gives much better control than the airbrush compressor used by some artists. Unlike a drinking straw, the long brass pipe in the middle of the set cools the breath and condenses the moisture out, which can be observed in a loop of the clear tubing. In this way, I can prevent accidental moisture droplets in the paint.
The final layer of the painting consists of a stylized, silhouetted lion's face to drive home the idea of an old but powerful animal. This was painted on with a brush, no special technique involved. Originally I was going to paint this only in black, but in the end I colorized the eyes to make them more piercing and the focus of the painting. The white accents I added as a stand-in for grizzle, to reinforce the idea of "old and experienced".
Thanks for looking, and please don't forget to upvote and reblog if you liked my art. Until next time!
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http://www.carolinepurcell.com/
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