Pour Painting – Why Everyone is Doing It

Pour Painting has a become super popular lately. When acrylic paints and a “pouring medium” is used, paints can be simply poured onto the canvas using various methods. The results are a very organic colorful abstract art piece that is reminiscent of the most striking elements in nature.

The Pour Painting popularity matches and coincides with the trend in marbling and geodes. The cool thing about abstract art being on trend is that it’s easy to do it yourself and you can’t really mess it up.

Pour Painting is easy to do. You literally just pour the mixture of paint and the pouring medium on your canvas. It is, however, messy. So make sure you have plenty of covering and a pan or container to do it in.

Learn how to do Pour Painting >

[Edit: Since this article was published there have been a number of paint pouring mediums that have come out that make creating the pour much easier. It’s still fun to experiment with lots of different ways so you can get the effect you want. But if you want ease of use, we recommend using a medium. This DecoArt Pouring Medium is a great choice]. You can see a lot of projects with paint pouring on our Instagram and Instagram Stories.

DecoArt Pouring Medium

 

Like with making Slime, there are a lot of different products you can use to get the effect you want. The pouring medium is needed to dilute the paint, but to also bind it together. Different methods result in different paintings. We tried many options at the different Craft Warehouse stores and we found that using PVA Adhesive Glue (Polyvinyl Acetate) works pretty good. You can also try it with Glossy Mod Podge, Flow Improver, Acrylic Gloss and Silicone Spray (available at hardware stores). There are some paints that are sold with a medium in them. SOme stores carry these and they are called Golden’s High Flow Acrylic Paints. 

We did some experimenting with a few different pouring mediums, including water. You can see the results of different recipes below. As you can see they all look great. What you choose depends on what result you like best – or perhaps what you have at home. There are many, many recipes for pour painting. These are just a few samples. Thanks to Justin in the Medford store for these examples!

Paint Pouring isn’t just about Canvas. See other examples of Paint Pouring >

Example of cells in pour paintings

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