 I'm Joanne from Art Resin here and today I'm joined by artist Christine Fitzgerald and Christine I'm so happy to have you in the studio with us. Thank you so much for having me. And you brought in two gorgeous pieces of art here so what are we gonna be working on today? Thank you I'm going to be using resin two different ways for this piece I'm going to use it as a top coat and then for this piece we're gonna be using the resin as a medium with acrylic paint and doing a Dutch pour that way. Amazing well these are beautiful I can't wait to learn how to do them so let's get started. Okay Christine so what are we gonna start with first? Today I'm gonna show you one of my most popular fluid flowers the sunflower we're gonna do a Dutch pour sunflower and I have all of my colors lined up here that way I don't get confused and I know which one goes in which place and as you can see I love to use metallics throughout all of my pieces and I find if I alternate between the flat colors and the metallic colors that'll give me a lot of the really yummy cells that we're looking for. Yes yeah your cell work is absolutely gorgeous and I love this color palette too. Thank you yeah it's so bright and happy. Especially on a day like today. Awesome so what's the first step? So the first step is to pour the base coat and then we'll pour the colors and we'll blow it out. Okay sounds good. Awesome so we're gonna start with the black center and I like to use my stick just so that I can make sure I get a proper nice floral center and then that way I can just go ahead and fill it in with the cup right after that. I actually like the thicker wood panels for pieces like this because it just gives it a little bit more depth to the piece and I think it just looks a little bit nicer. And then when you're coating it with resin too it's got the strength as well to support the weight of that resin. Definitely sturdy you don't have to worry about sagging or pooling or anything like that. So I just make sure that it goes down the side and you want to make sure that you have enough paint in the center and on the canvas or panel to begin with just so you have a good pillow for the paint to move across. This is acrylic paint so for this black I used the artist loft soft body acrylic and I actually added some Pebio iridescent gold to the mix just so that it's not a solid flat center. It has a little bit sparkle and of course the gold matches with the sunflowers. And now I will do the white base so this I will try to meet up as close to the black as possible with leaving a little bit of space so that I can put my yellow down without it mixing too much and creating kind of a money color. So you always want to make sure you have a pretty generous amount. It's always better to have more than less because trying to mix it up mid painting is never a good idea. Right and we've also propped up the panel just on some little plastic cups so it's not sitting directly on our tabletop. Yeah so with this technique with letting it run over the edge if you let it sit right on the table you could risk it sticking to the table and that's just a that's not very necessary. Exactly. So what did you mix the acrylic paint with to make it so fluid? Yeah so with my my specific technique I use a glue and water pouring medium. I start with glue and then I add my paint and then I add the water to make it the right consistency. Some paints depending on the brand or even certain colors within the same brand have a different consistency so they'll all kind of require a different amount of water to get to the right consistency for the Dutch pour which is pretty fluid because you want to be able to blow it out with your hair dryer. So is your goal to have all of your tints like the same fluidity? You want to try to get them as close to the same consistency as possible that way they're all moving the same way as well because if one is a little bit thicker it's going to move a little bit slower than the rest of them and that will kind of it could work in your favor but it will create different designs in your painting what you're going for and with the fluid flower you kind of want them all to be moving together versus against one another to have more of a uniform petal type shape right? There's definitely different variables that can affect your painting and how your your outcome will be and there's different techniques that require different materials so that you can you know get the acquired effect. So that's great you mix your own pouring medium so you can buy pouring mediums that are already yes there are definitely there are a ton of different pouring mediums out there but you can also just use water with your paints and you or you could go the route that I did and you could use glue and then basically what the glue is doing is it's acting as a binder so that when you add the water it's not breaking down the pigment in the paint too much which then would cause you know the opacity of the paint wouldn't be there the vibrancy of the colors wouldn't be there. Yes that's a good point. Okay so now I'm just going to give it a quick torch and get rid of any air bubbles that might be hiding underneath the colors and then we can start with the colors. Amazing. Okay and now we're going to start with the colors. So we're starting with the copper this is the artist loft copper and it's a nice orangey copper that's why I liked using it with the yellows but it's also very sparkly very metallic. Beautiful. Okay so I'm going to try to get as close to the black with the copper maybe a little bit over and that way that will also give us cells if they're kind of laying on top of each other and I leave a little gap between the black and the white so that the colors actually have a chance to be their true colors without mixing in the black or the white which will obviously give you either darker or lighter version of the color. So now we're going in with the deep yellow from Liquitex Basics. So you're going for traditional sunflower with the yellows but you also do like pinks and blues and yeah some of my favorite ones that I've created haven't necessarily been flowers you'd find in nature but that's the whole fun of fluid art is you get to take your imagination you get to take what you're hoping you could see in nature and make it yourself. So now I'm going in with a primary yellow the yellow I just used is actually one of my favorite yellows and I love that you're using not one not two you're using three yellows plus the two golds like it's gonna give it so much depth and dimension. Yeah well in real life when you look at a real sunflower there's so many different shades involved you're never gonna see just one shade of yellow and I really wanted to capture the actual sunflower because I feel like it's very a very symbolic flower of happiness and it means a lot to a lot of different people so I figured if I could get it as close to nature and realistic as possible then that's what I'm going for. So with the gold I usually just kind of add it as an accent so that it doesn't overpower too much because gold likes to take over and so now I'll just kind of accentuate the petal shapes that I'm looking for and then that way when I blow it out these kind of lines will almost look like the veins in a flower petal that you would normally see I'm gonna just kind of lay it on doesn't have to be perfect it's another good thing about fluid art is you don't have to overthink what you're doing it usually just sometimes it's not what you had hoped for but it's always beautiful so I'm gonna I'm going in with the copper and I'll do this with most of the colors just to kind of give it a little bit more depth to the flower so if you see here I have kind of a little blank divot here if I were not to fill that in with more white paint and I tried to blow it out it would act like a little dry wall and it wouldn't let the paint past it so you would kind of end up with a little break in your flow so you want to make sure that all of these little divots are filled in and again you're gonna be blowing over it all so it doesn't have to be perfect but you don't want to have any dry spots because like I said it will stop up your flow very quickly right that makes sense yeah when I just use an excessive amount of paint that way I can make sure that my colors will reach the edge of the canvas and then after you're done pouring the paint that's dripped over the edge do you leave it or do you like sand the sides down I usually leave the sides I think that it looks pretty with petals kind of flowing over the sides to okay so now that we've got all of our white down and all of our dry spots covered we're going to torch a little bit and get rid of the air bubbles perfect and now we start with the blow dryer okay let me get the hairdryer for you awesome now it's time to get started yeah with this with the flower specifically there are kind of a few tips I would have sometimes you'd like to hold the hairdryer upside down so you can get the right angle you want to make sure you keep it on an angle and not straight down and you also want to try as much as you can to try to do it in one swipe or one pass that way you're not kind of messing with the flow as much because we are going for petals you don't want it to look kind of wiggly if that makes sense got it and you find the hairdryer has a little more sort of force than like a heat gun with yes definitely a heat gun is a little bit more concentrated and this with the hairdryer you get more power and with the attachment you get a little bit more of the petal shape that we're looking for so definitely hairdryer great start I'm gonna hold it upside down actually it's a lot faster than people think too right with my mouth to kind of touch up the center part and if I need to go over any places like here kind of looks a little like I could do just one more pass here tidy it up a bit and then that's it she's done it is fantastic look at all the cells are amazing can fix the spot because that's bug wow look at the cells it is amazing so gorgeous I find the amps or sorry the artist loft copper really gives off good cells like that yeah you use lots of different brands of paint so do you find that mixing up the brands kind of gives you a different effect definitely so when you're mixing different brands I find you'll get more cells that way when you stick with the same brand they technically have the same makeup for the paint right so they're all gonna act the same way they're all gonna perform the same way when you start mixing different brands together they're kind of shocked as to what exactly they're they're touching or meeting up with and this is where you get the reaction of the cells right yeah and do you have much time like much wiggle room as far as like working time like yeah set up definitely so with paint you have quite a bit of working time especially with a Dutch poor where you are using the amount of paint you're using so it's gonna take a while to dry this piece would probably take two to three days to dry fully and then about a month fully to dry to cure before you can do the resin topcoat see oh right yeah so now I'm just gonna kind of jump into the center here and fix up these big orange spots kind of add some little floral ticks to it and then it'll be done and ready to go so you're blowing on it if you find the hairdryer is just a bit too intense yeah when you're trying to get in the little detail parts the hairdryer is just a little bit too powerful and not as precise as you can get with your mouth okay got it so right here where you see there's kind of like a bit of a harsh line it's not really following the flow of the flower I'm just going to blow the black out onto that copper we should see some cells form pretty quickly as well so cool I love it and you can see as the black is starting to kind of dry a little bit you can see that gold that you added in yes so I added the the pepio iridescent gold to the black just to kind of give it a little bit more dimension a little bit more than just a black yeah it really does I was just gonna say we're gonna torch it one more time to get rid of the air bubbles and then we just let it dry great any places to that look like there's a lot of white if you hit it with the torch it will actually bring the colors up to the surface yeah it's interesting how paint works I'm not exactly sure what what does it but I'll work with like you said it's all chemistry yeah yeah so how long do you have to come and do a few little touch-ups if you decide you want to you know yeah yeah keep tweaking it yeah definitely about an hour to an hour and a half it depends on how much paint you have on the canvas something of this size I'd say have about an hour and a half maybe even two hours to come in and kind of play with the composition of it if I needed to blow out any other little areas that I wasn't happy with it looks amazing the cell work is absolutely gorgeous thank you I'm so impressed actually I just want to show you one quick thing with the flash on my phone because sometimes it's hard to get the full effect of the colors and how they're really playing off of each other those metallics are just shining it looks fantastic look at you can really see the gold in the black yes so gorgeous yeah with the light you can really see the metallics and the color shift and how they're working playing against each other and then when we put the resin on top it's really really gonna amplify that sparkle yeah it's gonna bring it all out everything that you can't see now while it's even wet or when it's dry and kind of matte the resin is gonna bring it just right back to life amazing so speaking of resin because this is gonna take a few days to dry yes you brought in another piece that's similar to this right I did I brought in another sunflower piece so we can do the resin top coat on that and then that way you can see the product from beginning to end okay perfect so let's put this one aside we'll get the other painting and then we can start reasoning perfect okay okay so we are ready to resin here so you made this painting previously right yes I did this painting about three and a half weeks ago it is dry to the touch in about two to three days like I said but you want to make sure that it's fully cured before you add the resin or else it will lock any moisture that is still in lingering it will lock it in to the canvas or the panel that you're working with yeah and that is so important because resin and moisture do not mix so yeah fully dry yeah yeah and this is totally similar to the one that we just did right yeah so I used exactly all of the same colors to kind of get it as close to the replicas as we could get it so that there's no surprises yeah yeah you nailed it they look so similar thank you all right so should we measure and mix our resin all right we'll get going so we've got our panel is up on some stands so I'm going to measure out my resin your fabulous website actually has a really great calculator I use it every time that way I can make sure I'm using the proper amount for the size of the painting that I'm doing perfect so this one is a 16 by 20 panel and the resin calculator indicates 11 ounces total yeah right so five and a half ounces of resin five and half ounces of hardener so art resin is a one-to-one ratio equal amounts of resin and hardener and it doesn't matter if you start with the resin first or the hardener as long as they are equal amounts by volume and now we mix and I believe it's three minute you got a minute mixing time and you want want to make sure that it's fully mixed scrape the sides scrape the bottom make sure it's all incorporated together so you don't have any fogginess yeah or you might end up with like sticky spots right yeah and then any bubbles that are left in the resin it's not to worry about because you can always hit it with a torch or a heat gun afterwards to just pop all those bubbles exactly all right now that it's all mixed up we can get ready and add the top coat excellent so we just taped off the sides what we're going to do is dome this piece so we're going to place the resin just on the top without going over the sides so we just put some tape along just for a little extra insurance that way you get nice clean edges we're ready to go oh wow yeah immediately you can see the metallics yeah pop up like the color is gorgeous but this just makes it pop yeah and you're right those metallics are absolutely like singing so I noticed like as the acrylic dries it gets quite matte yes right so the resin is so nice to finish it off with it just to bring that gloss back it almost makes it look like it's wet paint yeah for sure just like in when we first finished the last sunflower it's pretty much the kind of look it's gonna have wet paint what a difference with that metallic there and you'll really be able to see all of the iridescent and metallics that are in the white negative space with the resin it'll really pull out all of that sparkle well you can really see the difference in the black here with the resin on top it's just so saturated and deep and art isn't has such a nice consistency for this you can really just nudge it yeah to the edge you can really make it move the way you want to move so now I will go in and just kind of try to get it to the edges yep so you can use your glove finger if you want you can use like a little spatula or little takeout knife plastic takeout knife works really well so I get it as close to the edges as I can but again like I said if it's not perfect that's okay mm-hmm so once this cures till it's dry to the touch so usually about the 24 hour mark or even a little bit before that you can pull the tape off yes before the resin is fully cured yeah I would definitely suggest that it's a lot easier to take it off plus you don't run the risk of pulling a chunk of the resin off once it's fully hardened yes if it peels up over your painting that could be a problem as well yeah and sometimes when the resin like fully cures the tape will just rip yes and it's really hard to get it off stuck in there yeah one of the things I loved most about art resin is the fact that it levels on its own and I don't have to worry about all of the wobbliness from my fingers or the the scraper I can hit it with the torch and it will all sit down exactly where it's supposed to yeah exactly and it's got a nice long working time as well it's about 40 minutes working time so yeah so you definitely have time to get it where you want it you just want to make sure that your surface is level and then it'll stay where you put it pretty sure we've got all that looks like it don't you get the torch for you please okay I like to hold the torch on an angle that way and also kind of look at the piece in the light you can watch the air bubbles popping and you can see if you've missed any other yes areas where they might be hiding out wow that looks absolutely perfect I'm going to turn the torch off now and I'm gonna kind of give it a look see if there's any dust or hair a little bit of dust right there so it's really handy to keep some toothpicks close by toothpicks are like the secret super tool that's getting out of all the last little pieces of dust it looks absolutely perfect thank you I love it thank you so much now once the resin dries about 48 hours it'll be ready for the wall amazing all right so she'll put this away and then are we ready to move on to the next project okay Christine so what are we gonna work on next so now we're going to do what I like to call a resin touch where we're gonna use the art resin as our medium and we're going to use acrylic paint to tint it and then that way you cut the dry time down and it could be up on your wall in 24 hours and fully cured within 72 hours perfect so it's like a two-in-one exactly getting both done in one step yep yeah okay great so should we start with our resin yep so I'm just gonna mix up the resin and a little bit extra for the colors and then we'll get started so normally you would need 11 ounces for a panel this size but you're gonna add a couple of extra ounces just to play with yes I'm gonna do I'm gonna do 13 ounces to give me at least one ounce of each color extra all right so now that I have the resin fully mixed I'm going to separate it into the three cups for the colors and then we'll get mixing our colors great so you're doing four colors right white plus three yes so white will be the base plus three colors and I'll add a literally like one little squirt of the paint to the resin and that will give me the color and the opacity that I'm looking for so the general rule of thumb no matter what colorant you're using is six percent yes right so one of these cups it's one ounce one fluid ounce which is around 30 mil so you're looking at like two mil or so yes of coloring not very much not not a lot at all it's really important when you're picking paint colors that you pick colors that blend really nicely together right because you don't want them to become muddy once they right when you get colors that don't work well together it pretty much will always be brown right so the color wheel is a good way to kind of check your colors see if they'll work together so if you were gonna do like a black base coat or blue or whatever would you paint your panel the same color yeah so yes whatever color you're planning on doing as your base to paint the panel or canvas beforehand will always come in handy with the resin pour that way you're not missing any spots you won't have any blank spaces and nothing's showing underneath right good check now we'll go in and tint the rest of the white and again even for this amount of resin it's still not a lot I did three squirts there well it's always best to start with less yes you can't take it away right yeah always start with less it's easy to add it's not easy to take away right so it's easy to do it on a wooden stick but if you if you're trying to look to see of the opacity if you look at your stick you you can't really see it behind the resin with a tint you would be able to see the wood stick right gotcha underneath the color okay and I'm think that looks pretty good great so we have our white resin we have our colored resin and now it's time to do the Dutch pour so the same thing as the sunflower we'll pour this on we'll spread it out across the whole canvas and then we'll lay the colors out okay so now we're gonna pour our base and get started I'm so excited to watch this and typically like how many colors would you use do you usually stick to your base coat plus like three for a regular Dutch pour I usually like to stick with like three or four but you can use as many as you want as long as you're using the right colors like we talked about before you shouldn't have any issues with muddying but you just want to go slow I find the more colors you use the slower you want to go to make sure that you're not causing any kind of crazy grays or browns okay so I will torch it quickly just to get some of these bubbles out okay and then we will lay the colors down so now we'll add our colors I'm gonna start with the pink I'm gonna put the metallic right in the middle hopefully create some cells and the blue will put on top and then that way we'll get a nice dark and light contrast nice I kind of like to give it a little bit of a s zigzag pattern mm-hmm kind of get some negative white space in there and again it doesn't have to be perfect yeah it's nice to give it a little shape though isn't it yeah yeah a little bit of flow for the flow right alright so now I'm gonna kind of go right over top but I'm also gonna zigzag into the white as well so that you'll get just pink just gold just blue in some spots hopefully it does take the blue right over top hopefully that'll give us some these cells peeking through underneath as well so just like a regular Dutch for you're gonna try to save some base so that you can flood a little bit around with art resin it does tend to level out right away so it's a little bit different than the paint but it still works the same way so it's just gonna give you a little something to push right with the hair dryer and then one last torch and we're ready to start gold is a power player any gold any gold will always try to take over right steal the show right yeah look at all the cells starting that's so cool but the hairdryer is really gonna make the magic happen right now this is where the magic starts okay here we go all right thank you doesn't it is a little bit lighter but still just this pretty I'm glad we went with blue purple can be tricky to work with and again you're on cool right yeah just like that wow that is amazing thank you it looks gorgeous you and as the resin kind of settles and self-levels and everything it's still gonna change a little bit right yeah so one major difference between the resin and just the acrylic paint with the paint you notice the cells popped up immediately with the resin it does take a little bit more time to kind of develop but as you can see we're getting some really nice little tiny yes up here as well yeah so it's doing exactly what I wanted it to do we've got the color where we wanted it and it's light where we wanted it yeah it's perfect yeah the cells are happening everywhere it's so cool to see it like evolve yes yeah and the more you leave it the better it develops so try not to with the resin you you don't want to mess around with it too much after yeah you don't overwork it yes exactly yeah great so now do we need to give it a final torch yeah so I'm gonna torture one more time get rid of any air bubbles that are left over and then we put it away to dry amazing so I see a couple little dust spots here so I'm just gonna hand you a toothpick yeah you definitely want to kind of move around look at your piece in different lighting because standing straight on I can't see that piece of dust but when I bend down I can definitely see it and more that's for sure which again it's inevitable it's in the air right yes for sure it's why it's so important to protect it while it cures yeah I'm always have the magic to the secret weapon it is it really is Christine this is like incredible from the time that you finished blow drying it to what has happened now like it is just evolving like right before our eyes growing yeah something completely different but it's it's still very very pretty I'm glad you liked it I love it great so we will put this away and let it cure and we'll be back tomorrow to reveal the two pieces perfect see you tomorrow all right we are back and the piece has cured and Christine it is absolutely gorgeous I love it yeah I'm really pleased with how it turned out like all of these cells are just like amazing yeah some of my favorite parts are like where the iridescent yellow is popping through the primary yellow so it's almost like you can't even see them until you're looking at them in a certain certain light yeah and that like you use sort of half metallics and half non-metallic right yeah paint and it really like makes such a difference it just glows yeah so when you line them up kind of like a metallic flat metallic flat they kind of fold on top of each other and that's where you get the cells yeah absolutely gorgeous then of course the resin just makes it pop like the colors are so vibrant yeah so when pieces dry and it's been cured for about three weeks it will look pretty matte even with the gold and the shimmery metallics and whatnot you'll you still won't really see the true shine but when you add the resin it really brings it right back to life absolutely okay so our second piece has cured overnight and now it is ready to reveal and it is a beautiful Christine I love it it's different from the first one but it is equally as beautiful yes you've got so many cool areas with the cells happening thank you yeah with with the acrylic mixed in with the resin it's definitely a softer piece but yeah definitely still equally as pretty yeah for sure and Christine one thing that really stood out to me yesterday watching you work was how many variables there are when you're creating this type of artwork we're gonna paint you use the order of the paint yeah definitely so even just keeping with the same colors and switching the order like you said if I would have put the pink on top it would be a predominantly pink piece with a little bit of blue in the background so yeah you don't even have to change your colors to get a different result all you have to do is switch the order that's so cool it's exciting because you can create so many different results you know exactly yeah amazing well thank you so much for coming into the studio to teach us not just one but two different ways of using resin with Dutch pores I learned so much for me it was so great to have you here thank you for having me I really appreciate it I I'm glad to come out and teach and learn myself so thank you for having me amazing well if you have any questions for Christine please leave them in the comments below don't forget to hit subscribe and we will see you next time bye