Elephant No. 216: Fantasy Prisme Paint

For today's elephant, I thought I'd play with some weird new paint I discovered at a local art store. I have a hard time believing that it will make the interesting patterns I saw in the photographed samples, but I guess we'll see.

Fantasy Prisme paint is a new product by the Paris-based Pébéo paint company, and is supposed to create a heavily mottled surface all on its own. I couldn't find any information on what kind of chemical reaction causes the pattern to emerge, but you can see a time-lapse of the effect below.

From what I can gather, the thicker the layer of paint, the more pronounced the effect. This presented a bit of a dilemma. If I painted a nice little design on paper or canvas, I probably wouldn't be able to paint thickly enough for the paint to do its work. However, if the paint was thick, it was also going to run, meaning I'd have to corral it somehow. Since I didn't feel like building something with sidewalls to contain the paint, I decided to try painting with an eyedropper.

I had chosen a shade called "leaf", which is a deep emerald colour on the swatch, but looks nothing like the swatch when you look at the bottom of the bottle.

 

For my surface, I used some cheap canvas boards from a discount store measuring 12.75 x 17.75 cm (5 x 7 inches). Since these come three to a pack for a dollar, I felt comfortable experimenting on them.

For my first elephant, I used the eyedropper, blobbing on paint in a general elephant shape. From the two shots below, you can see how I swirled the paint when I applied it.

Because of the way the paint spreads, it ended up looking not much like an elephant at all. This is what it looked like wet. If you look closely in the centre of the body, you can see the bubbly pattern starting to form.

And this is what it looked like when the paint had done its job. I found the effect interesting, but I wasn't all that enamoured of the weird shape.

I decided to try painting with a brush next. The paint goes on much like any other paint, but if you want the prisme effect, it has to go on thick. This clearly wasn't thick enough. Or thick at all. To complicate matters, this form of paint also doesn't really work if you try to build it up in layers. I tried to build up multiple layers; but unless you're willing to really blob it on, the paint doesn't seem to do much. The only parts that reacted were the heavy dots I dropped onto the background.

For my final elephant, I decided to try a combination of painting with a brush-like effect, and overloading the brush to drop on thicker amounts. This gave me an overall look that I liked; but again, the prisme effect was limited to a small area, and is nowhere near as visually effective as on the eyedropper version. The shot below shows the top of the third elephant's head, followed by a closeup of one of the nearby dots.

 A few observations that may be helpful if you decide to try this paint:

1. Although the store clerk told me that this was an acrylic, I'm pretty sure it isn't—or, if it is, it's acrylic with some weird additives. It has a relatively strong smell that reminded me a bit of xylene with a hint of acetone, and it can only be cleaned up with mineral spirits. Even then, the low-toxicity solvent I used had trouble removing everything from my brush.

2. Unless you're willing to sacrifice an eyedropper, don't use one for this. You'll never get it completely clean inside—well, maybe if you have access to a pipette-cleaning bottle brush.

3. The paint is extremely sticky as it begins to dry. In fact, I've never experienced anything like it. Apparently it also remains sticky for hours, so it's probably best to use it in a relatively dust-free environment.

4. It has a smooth high-gloss finish, even when dry, so bear that in mind when using it. If you use it for something like jewellery, you should probably also seal it with varnish or resin. On the other hand, it feels almost like a resin itself. It occurred to me only afterwards that this might mean that things could be embedded into the surface in interesting ways.

5. Although you need to think in terms of corralling the paint because of its tendency to spread, if you paint an underlayer and then quickly blob paint on top of that underlayer, it tends to stay more or less in place, allowing you to thicken certain areas of the painting more than others.

6. I was surprised at how little paint I used. Although I dropped a lot of paint onto my small canvases, I barely made a dent in the 45 ml (1.5-ounce) bottle.

7. As far as I could tell, swirling the paint around makes no difference to the final pattern you get. What does seem to make a difference is the thickness of the paint: the thicker the paint, the larger the bubbles.

I'm not sure what I think of this paint. If you wanted to have a high-gloss mottled surface in a specific area of a painting, this would be ideal. It would also be great for jewellery—either to enhance other surfaces, or to serve as an interesting surface all on its own.  

As a painting medium for representational images, I'm not in love with it, however. It might have been okay if I'd been working on a larger canvas, but I think it's the kind of thing I'd only use for discrete areas of a painting, or perhaps as a background for something else. That's not to say that I won't try this again sometime, but I may restrict its use to jewellery applications, or very specific placement within a larger canvas.

Elephant Lore of the Day
Although we know that elephants grieve the loss of other members of their species, it also appears that they sometimes grieve for humans. Over the years, there have been numerous stories of elephants mourning the loss of human friends; however, it also seems that they sometimes mourn people they don't know.

Some years ago, elephants raiding crops in the village of Katwe, Uganda ended up killing a villager. After killing the man, astonishingly, the elephants took the man's body and began treating it to the same funeral rites they would give one of their own. They circled him, touched him with their trunks, and made soft rumbling noises.

Even more surprisingly, when a group of villagers came to reclaim the man's body for the family's own funeral rites, the elephants refused to move. When nothing would induce the elephants to relinquish the man's body, the villagers got their guns and began firing into the air at close range. Elephants in Africa are nothing if not familiar with the sound of gunfire and what it usually means, so the grieving herd was finally scared away.

Researchers have observed this strange phenomenon before. Of all the other species in the world, human remains are apparently the only ones to which elephants accord the same respect they give their own.

Source: http://www.africapoint.net/general/african-elephant-endangered/

 

To Support Elephant Welfare
World Wildlife Fund
World Society for the Protection of Animals
Elephant sanctuaries (this Wikipedia list allows you to click through to information
on a number of sanctuaries around the world)
Performing Animal Welfare Society
Zoocheck
Bring the Elephant Home
African Wildlife Foundation
Elephants Without Borders 
Save the Elephants
International Elephant Foundation Elephant's World (Thailand) 
David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust
Elephant Nature Park (Thailand)

Elephant No. 44: Eyedropper Art

For today's elephant, I thought I'd try painting with an eyedropper. Before I realized there was a whole art practice devoted to this, I wasn't sure it was an actual technique. It was something that popped into my head mostly because I'd been reading about some very bizarre Surrealist art processes.

This is apparently another art activity recommended for kids. This already sends up a red flag for me, as I haven't had remarkable success with any kid-related activity so far. My inner child is clearly having a major tantrum these days. However, there are many examples online of people using eyedroppers to create art, so I decided I'd give it a try.

There seem to be two major strains of eyedropper art. One involves the use of eyedroppers as rigid brushes. The other is the simple dropping of paint on dampened paper—or even on blotting paper or coffee filters. I decided to save the eyedropper-as-brush method for another time, as it looked slightly easier and more straightforward than the droplet method. If this is the only eyedropper art I produce, might as well go whole hog.

The method I decided upon was this: spray the surface of a piece of watercolour paper with water, then drop thinned-down liquid acrylic paint on the surface of the paper with an eyedropper. Some instructions suggest using ink or even food colouring, but I thought ink might be too heavy a look, and food colouring might be too thin. That being said, I tested thinned-down acrylics, thinned-down watercolours, ink, and food colouring, just to be sure before I committed myself. 

I had no idea what to expect from the actual working process, except that the paint was sure to spread wherever I put it via capillary action. Capillary action, for those unfamiliar with the concept, simply means in this case that the water already on and in the paper will draw the wet paint towards it, dragging some of the pigment along with it.

That was the expectation, anyway. Any time I've done watercolours, I've ended up with at least one unwanted area of major paint bleed, mostly because I'm too impatient to let things dry completely.

Here the bleeding would be exactly what I was after, but I wasn't sure how hard it would be to control. From the few examples I saw online of this method of eyedropper art, the result looked really blobby. The idea I had in my head was a bunch of light-coloured paint circles, combining and overlapping to create a recognizable image—a form of pointillism, I suppose, but with really big dots.

I used a sheet of mid-range watercolour paper, and placed a selection of highly thinned colours in a paint palette. I also kept a spray bottle of water handy, just in case the paper decided to dry out faster than I wanted.

The paint was very pretty as it spread, but of course impossible to control. That being said, I ended up improvising, and came up with a few tricks and tips, described below.

First of all, make sure the paper is very wet when you start. If it isn't, the paint kind of sits there, sending out maybe a few tiny veins. Great if that's what you want; frustrating if it isn't.

With reasonably wet paper, the best paint consistency is something like regular milk. Too much thinner and it runs; too much thicker, and it doesn't spread.

Keep paper towels handy—but not the kind with some weird pattern or texture. I used something called "Viva", which my mother brings me from the United States. They're very absorbent, and have no pattern. 

The reason you don't want a pattern is that it will leave an imprint in the paint. The reason you want paper towels is that they're helpful if you want to sop up some of the blobs of paint. I found that the best technique was to gently lay a paper towel over the paint shortly after the paint was dropped on the paper, pat it lightly in spots where the paint was thick, then quickly remove it.

The spray bottle is definitely your friend with this technique. I sprayed the paper before laying a new colour of paint. I sprayed the paper right after I laid a new colour of paint. I sprayed the paper when I thought it was drying out too quickly. 

Using a spray bottle, however, definitely requires some experimentation. A quick blast will spread your paint around and make it fan out almost immediately. A fine mist won't do much in terms of leaching paint. The best technique for me was to mist the entire thing fairly generously, but from about 45 cm (18 inches) away.

Squirting paint at the canvas makes a big blob. Dropping paint from the eyedropper does the same thing. For precision, it's best to touch the tip of the eyedropper to wet paper. This makes the paint spread instantly, but in small amounts, and is great for creating shadows or vague outlines. To keep these precise blobs from being too obvious, mist again and blot.

That's about all there is to it. It wasn't particularly difficult, although it was somewhat time-consuming. I was essentially blotting up more paint than I left on the page, so I had to keep layering. And it's not a technique that lends itself to much control over where the paint goes. 

That being said, the final result is quite pretty in real life. This took about two hours, and I would probably try it again, perhaps adding some fine lines afterwards to delineate the elephant a little better. Or perhaps not.

Elephant Lore of the Day

You would think that it would be impossible for an elephant to camouflage itself, and indeed it is. Elephants require human intervention to help them dazzle-paint themselves. This allows them not only to hide from predators, but also to blend against a jungle background or even a clear, blue sky.

For the most effective elephant camouflage kit on the market, click here. It's pricey, but probably worth every penny if you're trying to hide a pet elephant in plain sight.

To Support Elephant Welfare
World Wildlife Fund
World Society for the Protection of Animals
Elephant sanctuaries (this Wikipedia list allows you to click through to information on a number of sanctuaries around the world)
Performing Animal Welfare Society
Zoocheck
Bring the Elephant Home
African Wildlife Foundation