Fluid Art: Hearts, from Idea to Poured Paint

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Jenny Guarino. I'm a fluid artist working out of my Houston studio. I want to take you on my artistic journey from when I have an idea to when I actually create the poured paint artwork. It's always an adventure with lots of detours and wrong turns. And then finally some magic happens. I teach from my Houston studio, and my goal is for everyone to be able to start with an idea create some art and keep on working on it until they are happy that it's in their colors, their style, and it's their own unique artwork. In this class, I want to use the idea of a motif So in my case, I'm choosing hearts. I've been thinking about hearts. I've had hearts on my mind for quite a few months actually, and wanted to develop this idea a bit further. The small in a smaller sense to start with little three inch squares to allow me to experiment and try out my ideas. I'm going to work through it from drawings to the poured paint, and I'm going to show you every step. I'm going to show you the materials. You will need to create your own artwork. You can choose your own motif. It could be a flower shape, a heart as per mine, which is absolutely fine or anything else that you can think of. Come with me on this journey as I explore the heart motif You can use the heart motif or some other motif and create some beautiful little pieces that you can keep for yourself and put them on display or give them as a gift. Come with me on this journey as we create some artworks together. 2. The Project: Let's talk about the project for this class. What I want you to do is get your pen and paper, however you like to put down your ideas, and we're going to explore a motif. I've chosen heart for this project. It's near to Valentine's Day. Then I'm going to pick some colors and have it I'm using little three inch panels. You can do whatever size you like, get your favorite tools for pouring. And you're ready to begin. I'm going to help you through all the stages from making a template of the shape of your motif to mixing and pouring the paints. We're going to talk about backgrounds this time, how to get multiple layers of colors to interpret your ideas that you've captured in your drawings. We will create four different artworks. Then you want to upload and share your completed results. With your finished artwork, you can display it or gift it. Next lesson is the materials. 3. Materials and Preparation: In this lesson, we'll talk about the materials and preparation. Before we get started, let's have a good workspace setup. We need some cradled panels, some paints, and just a few tools. For a materials by lesson list, download the PDF from the project resource section. The cradled panels, I'm using three by three inch square panels for this one. You can have them pre prepared with some background colors on them or even reuse something that you don't like anymore. Paints. For paints, just find a few of your favorite acrylics. And then a pouring medium to mix with the paints to make it flow. I use GAC 800 and use substitutes when I'm traveling. For the tools, it's really some paint brushes. This time we'll use some Q-tips and small squeeze bottles as well. This is just what I used. If you want more detail and information, go and look at my previous class on pouring. In this section, I'll just give you a little reminder of mixing your poured paints. I'm using a red tube paint and the flow medium I'm actually using is Joe Sonya's brand. I'm in Australia and the GAC 800. You can get it, but I just had that available more easily here. You can see because I'm using tube paint, I actually need more of that flow medium to get it to the right texture and it does tend to go. The tube paint is a bit lumpy. Leave it overnight and the bubbles will go away and you can also double check the next day if there's any lumps and make sure they're gone. Although in some of my paintings, you'll see there are lumps, and I actually as a lot of you who follow me in the art will know, I like texture, and I really don't mind the bumps as long as they add a little bit of interest to the work. These colors that I've chosen are ones that I've thought about because I've been thinking about hearts for a while. If you're struggling and not sure what colors you want to use, you can look at what I'm using and do something similar or go your own path. In the next lesson generating ideas, we'll cover that a bit more, so you can actually wait until after that lesson to mix up your paints. Or you might have some pre mixed paints already that are leftover from some other project. That's a great thing to use in this project when we're using little squares as well. I wanted to use some of this pearlescent color that I love, and I've got a little bit of paint left in the jar. So what I do then is put a bit of the pouring medium straight into the jar and make my mixture into the jar. And then I'm actually sort of cleaning out the sides and getting a maximum use of that paint that I love. Okay, here are the colors. They're all ready to go, although when you can still see a few bubbles, so I will leave them overnight or for a few hours just to let the bubbles settle. And your panels or canvases, make sure they're sanded and gessoed to the right finish that you want and taped on the back. Here's my three inch squares all ready to go. Next up, with your motif idea and a pencil and paper, we'll generate some ideas. 4. Generating Ideas: In this Lesson, we're going to talk about generating ideas. You're going to grab your favorite drawing materials, which could be pen and paper, watercolor or an iPad. I've chosen hearts as my motif and I've played around with the hearts on my iPad. You can choose whatever motif you like. A motif could be a heart it fits into a square format or some sort of flower or simple shape like a circle. I'm going to draw also with black and white pen. So it's sort of like an experimentation. It's to get to know the shape and get to understand it and get to just in a repetitive way, work through your ideas and build that knowledge of the motif that you've chosen. Here I'm just building little dots into one of the heart shapes. And on each page I've drawn squares. It's not really neat and tidy. It's just something fun and relaxing and repetitive to inform you on the shape that you're working with. This process is really interesting because the more you work with the shape and work through different ideas, you get more ideas. So you can see I'm writing love there and filling in the heart in a different way. So it just gives you more ideas for shapes and gets you to understand your motif. Once I've played around the black and white, I might I don't always move to color, and I use my iPad for that. You can also use watercolor. So I'll add different colors and shapes and play around with them. And in the end with these hearts, what I decided was I'd create the heart, basic heart shape, red, bronze, silver, and white. So now I've decided on my motif shape. I'm ready to go to the next lesson, which is to create the template. 5. Making the Template: For my motif, I've got a standard heart shape, so I want to make a template for that to make it easier to get that shape on my cradled square. You need construction paper, pencil, the cradled panel, and some scissors to make the template. So I've got a sheet of paper. I'm going to lay my cradled panel upside down and flat on that, draw around it, and cut it with some scissors to get the shape of the cradle panel or the canvas. Okay, so I've got my square that fits on here. I can use this as a stencil. I've been playing around, as you know, with the heart by drawing them. So I know that I can fold it in half and in half again. And with my pen, I can draw a heart starting around here, and I can adjust it if I don't like it. What I'm making sure of is that it's in the middle, roughly. If you want, you can fold it in half and just make the one shape. Can I like this? Or you can do what I've done it and it's not perfect. So it is, the art of imperfection that I like. So I'm going to just cut my heart out. Like I said, if you wanted to make it exact, then you can see this isn't quite exact, but like I said, I like that. If you are a more precise person, feel free to just trim it to the right shape now. Like this, I could trim it. I've already cut too much out of the other side. Like I said, I like my shape anyway. So this is my heart. If you want a perfect heart, fold it in half and just draw a half a heart. This is my heart motif. Now, I just double check that it fits perfectly on my cradled panel, and it does. And now I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to gesso and sand and prepare the cradled panel for paint. And, of course, I'll mix up my poured paints, as well. In the next lesson, we'll create a first heart using our template. 6. Create First Heart using a Template: Let's start on the first painting. This will be the first of four. This lesson, you need your template, your acrylic paints, acrylic paints mixed with the pouring medium and your cradled panel. Now, I do have a gessoed square, but I'm going to put another layer because I want to have a nice clear surface and a thicker paint, and I'm going to sand it in between as well. So a couple of layers for this particular pour, just to make sure it's as finished as possible on the sides as well before I pour because I'm not sure what's going to happen. So just making sure that it's all set up for success before I start the poor. The first thing I'm going to do is look at the sides and put an undercoating of pink on the sides. I like to do this because it adds to the layered effect. It makes the sides interesting, and it's a way of getting me started before I make too many decisions. And now I'm going to scrape some of the bronze over the side to give a more interesting effect. And, of course, when I pour on the top, there'll also be some drips over this as well, so that'll even make it more interesting as well. This is just a quick way to get started on your painting. If you need to patch it up later, of course, after the pour, you can. That's fine. But at least we've got going. And now I'm just scraping some of the leftover paint in a very dry way onto the top of the panel to unify the coloring. Now I'm going to use the template and outline it using a pencil to get the shape so that I can go ahead with the painting. But on that background, I can't see the pencil, so I'm going to use a different method. Now I'm going to hold the template down firmly with one hand and with the pearlescent paint the outline into the edges. That's working much better. Just remember, we're just experimenting. We're trying to play and have fun and learn from this, and we've got a few blocks to play with, so we're just having a go at creating some interesting paintings. Okay, so I take the template off, and doesn't that look really interesting now? You could actually just develop this a little bit more, and that would be done, but I'm going to take it in a different way with pouring. So just a little bit more of painting some of that pearlescent around the outside of the heart, and I'm ready to pour into the heart. Now, the thing about the pouring is i've let these now go for a day. So I had them quite runny when I mixed them, but now they're thicker. So especially the bronze is thicker. I'm not going to adjust these. It's going to move the least. So this is when you think about how your colours are going to move. This is quite runny and I've got a little bit of pink. Which is not much off, but it's thicker. So the runniest one, the one that's going to move the most is the red, which is what I want. So I'm just going to create the shape with my craft stick with the bronze in an outline. To possibly hold in the pour into that rather than running over the edges, so we'll see. When it's so small, it's a bit of an experiment. I'm scraping back a little bit because I do like to see bit underneath. It's quite pretty underneath. So we've got way more paint than we need, probably. I'll put some of this red in. You can scrape it back with a spoon or, you know, just a plastic spoon or a palette knife with this. This is quite big, though. But this is just, like I said, a little fun thing. So just grabbing what materials we have nearby, and we're playing without taking it too seriously. So if you like the variegated look, you can do it. I'm thinking a couple of blobs. I'm working with the shapes. I'm working along the shapes that I've created just by the scrape. And I do have the lighter colour as well, but I think I like just the two colors. The other thing I like to do is I don't really want the whole edge to be a solid brown, so I'm going to bring that up. And you can paint with a paint brush like I'm just having fun with my craft stick here. So the edge here is more red. And if you want, you can pull your heart out and have it running just a bit over the sides down here. So let that drip down there. So it'll coat come around the side of it. And we've got a bit of a dab here, a red blob. So one way is with a bit of paper toweling. Another way to blob it up is with a brush. And it means I can look at this and think, well, does it look good with the pink or do I like it with a pink background or do I like it with a white? It's sort of opportunity, 'cause you can always go over it with the white again when the rest of it's dry. And I don't want to fiddle too much because I'll break the walls of the poured paint. I'll cause myself more problems. So I'm gonna have to come back to that and I could do that now if I wanted too. Um, I'm going to drop a bit of brown bronze over the side here and bring that bronze. Just trying to get a clean edge on the bronze and maybe drop down here. So basically, when I say drop, there's going to be a dribble of paint coming down the side. And then I feel like this red needs to go up and off there. I'm scraping back a little bit. There, that looks good. I like the shape, so I'm just going to clean up with a bit of the background color, add a bit into the heart and see how it dries. What's interesting about this one when it dried, we know acrylics dry darker and the red had some translucent red in it, so you can see that. But it's also the bronze settled, and the red is highlighted, and there's highlights through there. So it's very interesting. And when you think it's finished, I don't think it quite is. I don't like the way the sides work with the front, so I'm going to work some more on the sides. So I'm going to mix up a little bit of paint, a pink color and work over the top of the sides. And it's just really like a cleaning up process to see what I like better. And so I might sometimes this works out straightaway and you've got the right color and you don't need to do anymore. Others need more work and this needed more work. I'm still not happy with it. I'm going to put another coat and it's more the pearlescent color that's on the top. I want to really look like it flows from the pearlescent color on the top. Just got a light colored pink underneath it. I don't know about the contrast, I'm just going to go over that again. It's just a matter of continually looking at your work and evaluating to make sure it's the best finished product that makes you happy and that you enjoy. And then when I'm happy with that color of the sides, and I think it looks balanced when you look at the overall composition from the front and the sides, I'm going to just get some Q-tips. I find Q-tips really handy, and I might just dampen them a little bit to rub off areas where I didn't really want the paint. So in this case, with the heart, I want that dribble to still be there. So it's still wet in the sides. So at this stage, it's easy to remove. So I'm just using the cue tip as a way of getting that off because it absorbs the paint. And then also a bit of wet brush work as well just to get work through that. So the wet brush is just helping to loosen the paint and then the cue tip to absorb the wet work afterwards. So here's the finished product. It's got a lot of texture and interest and contrast that I love. Now that we've played with one heart, let's try another one. 7. Create Second Heart using Persistence: This lesson is about persistence, and it's in three parts as I work through my idea. Here's a list of the materials I'll be using for this lesson. First of all, I'm drawing with my template, doing the pencil. It's on white, so this time it stands out, that's fine. And my plan is here to fill in and do a background with the paints that I have, so I'll have a background color and a foreground color. The background color I've painted on with that pearlescent, a mixture of pearlescent white and the Jo Sonyas background color. I'm doing the sides as well. Once again, the plan is for a layered heart look, so I'm going to get the sides finished as much as I can, as well here. Now I've got my red metallic paint mixed with a little bit of metallic bronze, and it's just paint this time. There's no pouring medium in it because I'm working on a background. So I'll just use a little bit of water to water it down, and I'm going to paint into the heart shape. Once again, this is just playing around and experimenting and seeing what you like and don't like. This is a very fluid mixture, so I'm dropping some in with a dropper as well, leaving some bits white. But then deciding to fill it in. Now, that looks interesting there, but I'm going to keep on going. Now I'm just dabbing in a little bit of the actual bronze color as a contrast. This mirrors what we were doing with the drawings or what I was doing with the drawings in black and white. I had my little dots, so I'm dotting them. I didn't like the dropper, so I switched to a brush. And I'm changing it up to the left side of the heart looks a little different than the right side of the heart, just as some of my black and white drawings. Then a little bit tidy up with the edges, and actually, you could have stopped here. This could be enough to just build on in that same pattern with maybe some thicker and heavier paints. But I decided to add another layer of poured paint. This is part two of persistence. I pull out the colors that I've mixed and just check it there the right thickness that I want. Before I move on to pouring. And once again, I'm going to use the thicker paint and my craft stick to basically build up an edge to hold the other more thinner paint inside. The table wasn't quite level, so I just did a quick adjustment then. Now I'm filling in with that red paint, and we know this dries a darker red from the previous square. So we know a bit more about the colors. And I'm just adding some different color layers in. In a way, I'm using the craft sticks like I would a pen. I'm drawing in some different shapes. I'm really working and trying not to mess up that heart shape, adding in some contrast with the bronze and basically just exploring and experimenting. And this is another point where potentially you could stop and let that dry. But once again, I didn't. I decided to put the pink in. And now the different stages of this look quite beautiful as you can see the fluid paint moving around. It is a tiny square, and there is a lot of paint on I quickly whip around and do the sides to get the color of the paint. I've got the sides. In doing that, I lost the heart, so I was sad about that and started adding colors in again. And from a video perspective, at different points, this is really interesting. I've included this little bit, and I've sped it up so that you can just see how much I worked it and added color and change the shapes to try and make something work here. The paint was too thin by now and runny and moved too much. The problem was it lost its shape with all that paint when it dried with the colors all blended together, just dried really flat. It will make a nice background. That's the thing. So some things when it doesn't quite work, it's still going to work because that background is beautiful. So this leads to persistence Part three of this particular lesson. Using my experience from playing around, I'm thinking I could squeeze a heart on top of this and have a beautiful background. But before I do it, because I'm a bit worried about things, I'm going to do a little practice. And look at this. That is so amazing. I really like that. So I put that aside. I'll use it as a guide for this one, and maybe I'll do something else with that later. But with this heart, I really want to fill the whole shape of the square. And I'm not going to do my template anymore. I've tried that. I've used that. I'm just going to use this other heart shape that I've made as an idea to get started. I made it too small, don't like that. So I'm going to expand the area of that heart out a little bit more. I like the uneveness of it. I like the left side of the heart being lower. It's got a bit more movement, so I can work off that. And as you go along as we do, if you make a mistake, I'll just wipe it off. Now, because the surface is really shiny because that paint has gone hard and it's got the medium in it, it's quite an easy surface to wipe off paint if you make a mistake. I'm continually looking at it and evaluating and deciding, well, what do I want to do? So make sure you remember to keep looking at your artwork as you going. And here you're going to see me fiddling and adjusting the shape, so I'm using the brush to wipe back a bit of the paint and to change the shape a bit more. And I'm wiping it off and wiping it into the paper towel. Which will absorb some of the paint. In this area, I'm taking it off. I'm just trying to make it interesting, honestly. A bit of contrast with the white, it's starting to look really interesting. I'm comparing it back to my shape. That looks good, but as it is with me, I'm going to keep on working it a little bit more to see if I can make it even more interesting, but I could have stopped back then. I'm adjusting the top of it. I'm just taking a bit off the top and adjusting that shape a little bit. The silver that I'm putting in now, it's more contrasty and it's heavier so it's not going to move. It's going to sit there and stay. I like that. Now's the time to make sure I clean up all the edges so I have nice edges of the heart and I've blobbed a bit of water on there just to make sure I really am getting off what I want to get off. Pull your artwork up closer to you just to get a bit closer to it to check that you have removed all the paint that you wanted to remove. Just some final touches to get those edges nice. Because it's so small, attention to detail with some of the edges is important because it's going to be more noticeable. I love the way this is looking just a final few touches and it looks good. It's done. I think that looks good, so I'm going to pop the bubbles with my blow torch as a final thing to do before I let it dry. Doesn't it look great? It's still drying, and you'll notice in the finished one that holes gone because that red is more fluid, it's moving very slowly as it dries, so it filled the hole. But it still looks wonderful. I really love it. Next up, we're going to work on another heart. 8. Create Third Heart using Test Panel as a Starting Point: This lesson, we're going to work off the little test heart that I made in the previous lesson. You'll need the test heart on the cradled panel, mixed poured paint, Q- tip, and squeeze bottle. Just a quick reminder on how this one was created. I'll show you on this pre prepared one. If I squeeze, I'm just doing a little test. It comes out and we have some pretty shapes. Now, that looks even better than anything else I've done before anyway. Oh here. I just love this shape, but it doesn't seem quite enough on that square. So I'm going to add some light gray that I've mixed up and put in a squeeze bottle as a first attempt, and I'm following around that shape too. I like the shape, but the shapes still there, but I've got a bit of interest around the shape. Then I'm going to add some silver, and I've accidentally dropped a bit of the silver. I find that the Q-tips when you're working this small format, are really good for removing any drops or spills. Sometimes you need to have a couple of goes at it with maybe a little bit of wet water on the Q- tip as well to help it, and then a dry end to take it off. So once I've removed the drop, it's best to remove the drops as they appear when they're wet because it's much easier to remove them. Then I'll go ahead with the darker silver to add a little bit more contrast. So I'm just looking at the shape and deciding what I want to do with it. I could have left it there, but as usual, I decide to keep on going a little bit more, and I'm actually using the tip of the squeeze bottle as my paint brush as well to mix in. And also, I like to use the Q-tip as well to shape to add a bit of shape by pulling off some paint. I'm really using the tip as a paintbrush. Adding paint, removing paint into the different spots and enhancing that shape. I'm just going to keep on working with it and playing with it, adding and taking away paint until I'm happy with it. And then, of course, I always look at the sides to see how the sides are working and whether the drips are falling, you can see the way the heart falls. I'm going to want to have a drip down the side there as well to look at. I'm about to stop here because I do really like the effect. And I'm going to leave it to dry. Here it is another beautiful finished piece, doing quite well here. In the next lesson, it'll create the final heart. 9. Create Fourth Heart using Test Panel Design as Starting Point: In this lesson, we're going to be inspired by the design I created by accident when I was creating the second heart. Let's start by looking at the shape we created before, pulling out my sketchbook and trying to draw some shapes based on that that actually fill the square panel. So once again, it's just quick little sketches and trying to find something that fills the space of the cradled panel. I have a couple of these that I like. That's what I'm going to start with. For this one, once again, I'm actually adding some extra coats of paint over the top of the panel just to make sure I've got good coverage on the top and the sides, especially since this time I'm trying to do just a red heart squeezed on it, and the rest of it's going to be my plan is the rest of the background is going to be white. So to get it nice and smooth, I'm going to paint and sand until I'm happy with the surface. Just another reminder, I use a pretty fine tooth sanding block to sand the top and also the sides and the edges of the cradle panel. And now I'm ready to pour the paint. I have the red color that I like already in my squeeze bottle, and I have the picture next to me and also the original shape. So I'm just going to squeeze it. This is going much faster than all the previous hearts, but this is just a quick idea based on what I've done previously. I'll sit back and study it a little bit to see what else I need to do, not to worry about the bubbles because I know I can pop them. There's a bit of graininess in the red paint, which I like. Once again, if you want to smooth the finish, just make sure that you've got your paint mixed together really well. You can pop bubbles with the tip or a blow torch, one or the other or both. Here's the blow torch popping a few of the bubbles, quick bursts. And the end result is simple but impactful, and you can see there are a couple of bits of texture there, which, like I said, I really like. So we've made four hearts, based on our initial idea of a heart motif. What we do next? Larger, smaller? Let's talk about that next. 10. What Next?: In this class, we've worked with a motif of the heart and created four artworks that explore that theme. We've also created many ideas for other artworks from drawings to accidents that happened during the creation of the other artworks. I've got quite a few ideas that I can work on the pink and white heart. I could make them larger. I could make different colors. I could explore through repetition, this idea of hearts for quite a long time, the possibilities are endless. 11. Final Words: Well, thank you so much for coming on this journey with me. I hope you see the artistic process that it's not all perfect. Nothing works, especially in my case, the same way every time, especially when you're using fluid art or poured paint or anything with water or pouring medium, means that you're going to get unexpected results when the paint's mixed together. But it's a wonderful journey, and I love the surprises that come along the way, and I can't wait to see what you've created based on this process of generating some ideas first, then choosing your colors and then experimenting with layers of paint. Let me know how you went, I'd love to see your work, and we'll see you in the next class. I hope you enjoyed this class. And remember, you can always contact me through Skill Share. You can follow me on Instagram to see the work that I'm creating, or the inspiration that I'm getting as I'm traveling the world.