What is Fluid Art?

Fluid Art is a form of abstract art.  Most artists use acrylic paints and some mixture additives. The mixture allow paints to thin and flow more easily. Some artists will just use water to thin the paints, but others will add a some type of professional pouring medium or a paint additive, specifically, floetrol. The other reason to thin the paint is to change the viscosity of the paint.  The way that the different viscosity of paint colors will interact to create different effects like "cells". 

When you have the viscosity down point you can play with the densities to get cells, but there is definitely a science to it.  Trial and error also will get you there.  However, if you struggle with that there is a nifty trick of adding oil to the paint to encourage the cells to pop. Silicon oil is use by many artists along with a chef's torch to help stimulate the art to pop.

Above you'll see cells and some webbing effects. 

There are a bunch of different techniques to create fluid art. Classically, if you can even stay that, fluid acrylic was dripping, dropping, pouring, and/or splatting paint.  In the recent years, their has been a massive focus on different pours of acrylic paint. In the upcoming posts I'll go into more detail about the different types of fluid painting you can try out. Some will be: 

• Dirty Pour Flip Cup
• Puddle Pour
• Open Cylinder
• Swipe
• Ribbon Pour
• Pre-lift slide

Bathroom Series #2

This painting has the same overall palette as Bathroom Series 1.

I do use some pretty cool tools for this. My favorite tool when doing these are definitive the silicon wedges, but I'm also using some large palette knives.

• Liquitex #10 Large Palette Knife
• Princeton Art & Brush W-06 Catalyst Silicone Wedge Tool, White

Lets start with the paint colors:

• Mars Black
• Titanium White
• Cobalt Blue Hue
• Cadmium Yellow Deep Hue
• Hooker's Green Hue Permanent
• Bright Aqua Green
• Brilliant Yellow Green

Some of my paintings you'll find are geometric swatches. I don't know if that's a real term, but its what I'm going to call it for all intents and purposes.  Typically when creating these I go with the flow and just keep painting. Whatever happens, I just keep painting.

There's a concept in literature criticism called stream of consciousness. Its mostly a form of narration where the all thoughts and feelings are just freely expressed without edits.  Some writers use this approach too, and its sometimes called free-writing.  I've tried this method in the past when I had writers block. You basically keep writing, writing anything that comes to mind.  If you get stuck you just write that word over and over until a new idea comes to mind, but you don't stop. when they are writing or if they have writers block to force through it.

So, the idea behind this painting is to just keep painting anything that feels right and not necessarily edit, but instead, build on top.

I hope you enjoy the video below and feel free to purchase prints at ArtPal.  I'm looking into selling originals so, if you're interested drop me an email and we'll make it happen.

Spetem Circulus and Camera Fail

It must happen to everyone at some point. You start up the camera to record the action, and it decided 25 minutes in that its going to stop.  It doesn't run out of battery just stops.  It was a big bummer when I got up after painting this one to find that it stopped just when it was getting good! Well, you only make that mistake once.  This painting taught me the fun trick of setting a timer if I chose to record, because well, better safe than sorry again.

This Septem Circulus was done in the realm of the Morning Coffee. I was working with roughly the same color pallet, thought perhaps slightly brighter. I employed drips with paint and also with a spray bottle filled with water to allow the paint to drip off the canvas.  I also rotate this painting many many times to get different dripping effects and layer.

Instead of the hard lines and curves, I have circles, similar to Bathroom Series #1. For the circles I pulled out some cups, bottle caps, and medicine cups.  There's also faded circles made from small bubble wrap and two sets of seven circles in red made from large bubble wrap.

Check out the video below and feel free to purchase a print.

Morning Coffee

This painting was a lot of fun to work on.  It might have been the smell of coffee grounds while painting, but whatever it was it was a fun time creating this one.  I tried a lot of new things with this painting that I hadn't done before and I wasn't sure how it would work out. All in all, I feel like experience wise, I learned a great deal about layers and texture. The overall tone of this painting was in the red or rusty tone.  I was really enjoying the Burnt Senna and Deep Yellow and some variants of brown.

So, what did I do in this painting...

Well, I created my own type of spray paint with little spray bottles. I bought, probably too many little spray bottles, and starting filling them with paint.  You see me use white, brown, and yellow in the video.  Always to layer, but sometimes to add some geometric interest and sometimes to brighten sections. I also dripped some High Flow paint, and some more self made drippable paint. 

The most fun part was how I was going to add another textural element to the piece. I had been toying around with the idea of sand, but what I had turned out to be a bit too coarse. I turned to coffee.  I don't drink coffee, but my inlaws were in visiting recently and we had some left over coffee.  Nothing goes to waste when your an artist looking for new and creative ways to add interest and save money. 

At this point I had added many layers and the background was looking pretty neat but thought that it needed some structure overall.  First, I started working the sprays to get a few curves.  This was interesting because depending on the density of the paint in the spray bottles I got different effects.  When there was more paint it in the water and paint ratio, it came out a stream instead of a spray.  Next, I mixed the coffee with some paint to get it textured, then i added some red coffee textured lines of different sizes and used black coffee textured lines to add a shadow affect. 

I have to say the smell was amazing the whole time.  Well, if you've gotten this far, take a load off and watch it in action! 

You can also purchase some prints here at ArtPal. Thanks for stopping in!

Bathroom Inspired Series

I'm finally writing a post about the video inspired by my houses 70's style bathroom color palette.  When searching for our first home we pretty much fell in love with the location first and foremost.  Then we came inside and well the whole house was straight out of the 70's, but it did have some charm to it.  Room by room I think we got more and more used to it.  Then we walked into the bathroom. Man, on man, the toilet is a nice shade of blue with a hint of green, with a sink and bathtub to match.

So, that blue was the basis of my color palette. We also have a shower curtain that pulls blue green and brown all together.  You'll see this color palette come up more and more in future pieces. 

For this piece i was experimenting with mixing some techniques I've used in the past, but combining them in new ways.

You'll find typical brush on canvas, some spray bottle dripping paint, the circle patterning that I was doing at the time, some splattering via paint brush and splatter tool all layer upon layer.


When i'm painting a use a few different colors and mix them together often. For this piece I used Liquitex Basics paint.  I use these because it keeps costs down and they are pretty solid paint choices with a consistent pigment and body consistency.  The canvas is a basic back stapled stretched canvas by.

Specific Liquitex Basic colors uses are:

• Mars Black
• Titanium White
• Cobalt Blue Hue
• Cadmium Yellow Deep Hue
• Hooker's Green Hue Permanent
• Bright Aqua Green
• Brilliant Yellow Green

Tools Uses: 

• Circle Objects
• Plastic Cups
• Medicine Cups. The ones that come with liquid medicine so that you can pour yourself the correct serving.
• Tops of Tea and water bottles
• Paint Brushes
• Liquitex Round Splatter

If you're interested in watching the video, check it out below. If you came here from already watching, welcome to my page! Please browse around if you want and subscribe for more videos in the future.  If you want to get a print of this piece home with you check out gallery on ArtPal.  Feel free to follow me on the social medias to get some behind the scenes, work in progress, and early access shots.