What you need to know:
What is acrylic pouring medium (PM)?
Pouring medium is essentially something that is added to the acrylic paint that changes the viscosity of paint, improves flow, helps to prevent cracking and crazing, and adds adhesive and binding properties when pour painting. Acrylic pouring medium comes in many forms from professional quality mediums to budget friendly alternatives. Professional quality pour mediums are often pricey and include Liquitex Pouring Medium, Golden’s GAC 800, Lukas Pouring Medium, DecoArt Pouring Medium, Amsterdam and others. There also quite a few moderately priced pouring mediumon the market now, as well.
However, the most popular pouring medium is Floetrol by Flood which is not a a proper PM at all but an additive to control the flow of house paint through sprayers. It is economical and can be found in most painting sections of hardware stores or ordered online.
Another popular and readily available alternative to commercial PMs is PVA Glue and water such Elmer’s Glue All.
You may ask, can I use just water? You can, but some of the pouring mediums have the benefit of creating cells, as well as, adding sheen and adhesion while preventing cracking and crazing. (There’s a whole article on that here.) That being said, such techniques as a Dutch Pour may work considerably better with just paint and water. It really just depends!
Below are some pros and cons of various pouring mediums.
- Liquitex, GAC-800, Pebeo, Lukas PMs -add sheen and may reduce crazing but are fairly expensive. (Liquitex is hard to clean up when dried.)
- DecoArt is mid priced and has a sheen but produces few cells.
- Floetrol-dries dull and often has particles in it but is cheap, easy to clean up and readily available.
- Sargent, Montmartre, and others also have lower priced PM alternatives in which some people have had success.
Many artists have mixes that involve various amounts of the above pouring mediums creating something new that works for them. Experimentation is key to find out what PM works for you.
TIP: The amount of pouring medium to paint is dependent on the quality and pigmentation of the paint you are using. While cheaper craft paints with less pigmentation need less PM (usually 1 part PM to paint), student paints might be 2 parts PM to 1 part paint while medium bodied paints would be 3 parts PM to 1 part paint. Heavy body paints would require even more PM with a ratio of 6:1. All paints are different. You have to experiment!
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