Acrylic Pouring with Magicals: Experiment by Maria Lillepruun

Hello everyone!

This is Maria Lillepruun with you today with an experiment in acrylic pouring. This kind of art has been very popular worldwide recently, so I wanted to try it out too, of course! I am a self-learner in this area. I’ve learned quite a bit by now during my trials and failures. Today I want to share my experiment with you. I believe that every experiment becomes an experience!

I tried to do some steps of acrylic pouring, but the only acrylic paint I used was white. All the other colors I made up simply by mixing Lindy’s Gang Magicals with white. My Magicals are all from the Mad Hatter Shimmer set. My set actually contains 6 colors, it is an old version of the set. Right now all our Magicals come in 5 pieces per set, all perfectly combined for you to play with!

Here is the video of my trials. I will explain it precisely afterward.

Basis process and results

First of all, I prepared the paints for pouring by mixing together white acrylic, our Magicals, pouring medium, pouring oil and a little bit of distilled water.
Then I combined all the colors in one cup and flipped the cup over on the canvas.
The opaque white color makes all the paints lighter, so it is not really possible to achieve very vibrant colors this way. Even if you add a lot of Magicals, the colors on the canvas will still be quite pale. Therefore, if you would like to have brighter colors, you can try mixing Magicals with semi-opaque white paint.
You can also mix them with something transparent like resin. This will be definitely much brighter! But it is a different technique required.
I added some glitte, and played with a straw, a thread and a wooden stick to create an interesting effect on the canvas.
When the canvas dried, it crackled a little 🙁 This kind of crazing happens when the top layer of the paint dries faster than the bottom layers. Most of the time, the reason for crazing is that the paint layer was too thick… I made this mistake twice, so now I know I need to work better on the viscosity of the paints and let them flow off the edges even more.

Later on, you can see in the video that I sprinkled some dry Magicals straight onto the wet acrylic surface.
I had to spray some water too, otherwise, the Magicals would not be dissolved enough. I achieved much brighter canvas this way. Frankly, it is not an acrylic pouring technique anymore, it is mixed media art, but I am a mixed media artist after all, so I decided to be brave and try it all out.
This canvas also crackled while drying. I assume the tension in layers caused this.

After I shot the video you just saw, I made another trial and it was more successful. I mixed the same Magicals with white paint, added bright lemon acrylic paint and a really liquid white paint. By decreasing the viscosity of the additional white paint, I managed to make the colors flow quicker and prevented crazing.

I will definitely continue to experiment, mixing acrylics with Lindy´s Gang products, as well as other mixed media products, and we´ll see what happens! This is just so much fun, isn´t it?