I've been using a combination of pouring paint and direct painting with the acrylics. I do several pours initially and then put resist on my design to protect areas from future pours. Then I add more layers of paint to the background until I get the effect I want. I am working really wet and because the TerraSkin is not porous, the water and paint sit on the surface and it can take awhile for each layer to dry. Being the impatient person that I am, I put the painting out in the sun to speed up the drying process because I was excited to add another layer of paint. I know (from reading and from experience) that paintings with resist should not be put in the sun or exposed to heat (from a hair dryer) because the resist can get gummy. It's been really hot here this past week so the painting in the sun was probably dry in about 5 minutes and if I had taken it out of the sun in such a short period of time, it might have been okay but I got busy doing something else and forgot about it for about an hour. The good news is that the paint was dry. The bad news is that the resist was very gummy and not easy to remove on about half of the areas.
At this point, most reasonable people would have thrown the piece away and started over but I'm stubborn and was determined to save the painting. I did, but it probably added a couple of hours to the process. I think it was probably harder to remove from this surface than from paper because the goo just kept sliding around on the surface. I finally used dry flour on the surface to make the resist more crumbly which worked better than anything else and then removed the final film with alcohol, which didn't work really well. Maybe I should have tried fingernail polish remover but that may have harmed the surface. So...don't put a painting with resist in the sun or leave the resist on the surface too long. I've done that twice so hopefully I have learned from my mistakes now.
Waterlilies on TerraSkin
Image Size 16" x 20"
Acrylic
