I fully and completely understand that not everyone can afford to buy one of my sparkly paintings, so I’m going to show you how to make your own…or at least the sparkly background part. (I’d show you how to make girls too, but I think Suzi Blu would have my head if I did that and understandably so. That’s her gig, not mine.) Really, my backgrounds are pretty easy to do, there are just a lot of layers and you have to sit around waiting for stuff to dry a lot. You’re also probably going to have to use products you may not be familiar with, but all of them are easily obtainable and while I don’t know American websites to buy these things from, I do know Canadian ones that ship to the US, so I’ll link those ones. People have been asking me to do this tutorial for a while now, so I hear you! Here it is. :o)

First of all, if you haven’t seen the video I made a few days ago, this is what you’re making (minus the girls):

Now that you’ve seen that, let’s get started!

The first thing you need is a canvas (or wood, but I prefer canvas because you can sew into it). I buy mine from Curry’s and the ones I get are called “gallery stretched canvas” (and I buy them in value packs) which means that they have a thicker frame and the staples are on the back instead of the sides. They are also pre-primed with gesso. Now, on the Curry’s page that I linked to, you have to be careful because some sizes are the canvases with the thinner frames (you can tell by the picture which sizes are these ones, the thicker good ones are usually even, square sizes) and while there really isn’t anything wrong with the thinner-framed canvases, I just don’t like them. I like things sturdy. And I actually just checked and I don’t think Curry’s does ship to the US, but I’m sure you can buy similar, if not the same canvases on Dick Blick’s site.

So you have your canvas, put it on a surface you don’t mind getting paint on. We’re working with acrylics which clean up with soap and water…most of the time…but still, don’t do it on your antique coffee table or something. I just use my desk, which is easily wipeable for wet paint and scrapeable (am I spelling these words correctly? spellcheck is having a fit) for dry paint.

Now the first thing we’re going to do is a basecoat of paint, which is pretty straight forward. Just paint your canvas in your painting’s primary colour. I always use a metallic paint for basecoating and in this case, I’m going to be using “Splendid Gold” by DecoArt.

DecoArt’s Dazzling Metallics come in a fairly wide range of colours, with like, 10 different shades of gold alone (but no goddamn pink or turquoise because they discontinued them!) and you should be able to get them at any Michael’s store for I think, $2.99 CDN for a 2oz bottle. Alternatively, you can buy them at this site I use a lot called Stockade, which definitely ships to the US. Dazzling Metallics can be found on their site here. The other metallic colour I’ll be using, which I didn’t take a picture of, is DecoArt’s Black Pearl, which is a metallic black. (Oddly, Stockade’s site doesn’t appear to have Splendid Gold, which is actually kind of weird because they’re usually pretty good with having the whole line when it comes to DecoArt’s stuff.) Anyway…

So this is our basecoated canvas. “Splendid Gold” is actually a fairly translucent paint and while you could do two basecoats so it’s more opaque, I only did one because it’s just a basecoat and we’re going to cover it up anyway. So once your basecoat is dried completely, you’re going to add a tick coat of crackle medium. Now, there are several different types of crackle medium, which I’ll go into another time if people want me to, but for this we’re going to use DecoArt’s “Weathered Wood“, which is probably my favourite product ever and I’ve been using it for, god, as long as it’s been around.

So once you’ve added your thick coat of Weathered Wood, you’re going to want to let it dry completely and at this point, I usually let it dry over night because with doing a thick layer of it, sometimes it can take that long to dry completely, especially if it’s in the middle of the summer and it’s humid. Now, a cheap alternative to Weathered Wood (even though Weathered Wood itself is fairly inexpensive) is mucilage glue, which is the kind of glue you probably used in your early grades of school. It’s sort of a golden colour and has a rubber applicator at the top with a slit in the middle. I’ve seen it at the dollar store the odd time, but other than that I haven’t really seen it anywhere. If you’re going to use mucilage glue though, in my experience you’ll want to do TWO coats. Do your first coat, let it dry, then do another and let that dry. Honestly though, Weathered Wood is easier, works better and is just as inexpensive, I only mention mucilage glue in case it’s what you happen to have around.

Here’s what Weathered Wood looks like (in a dark room, sorry, my office is a damn dungeon at night :o/) when it’s wet:

So once your coat of Weathered Wood is dry, you’re going to do a layer of plain old white paint. You can use any non-metallic colour you want (the metallics won’t crackle), but I always use white because the splatters , which we’ll do later, show up better than with any other colour. Now, doing your top crackle layer is a little tricky and you have to work fast. First, you want to use a large flat brush (this one’s a good size, although you can buy much cheaper brushes than this one) and second, you want to SLAP that friggin’ paint on. Load up your brush with as much paint as you can and just slap in on, all over the canvas, as fast as you can because the second the white paint touches the crackle medium, it’s going to start crackling and if you move it around too much with your brush, the paint is going to slide around on top of the crackle medium and your cracks won’t look very much like cracks, they’ll look more like weird, cracky, chunky streaks.

Another thing to remember when doing your topcoat on top of crackle medium is to NOT use cheap craft paint. Arguably, some snobs would consider DecoArt’s Americana “cheap craft paint”, but what I’m talking about is the value brands you can buy at dollar stores or even at Michael’s or A.C. Moore’s for less than $2 for an 8oz bottle. These cheap brands don’t work so well with crackle medium because they don’t have enough pigment to get the kind of coverage you want and when you’re doing your topcoat on top of crackle medium, you don’t have the luxury of adding a second coat, so you want to start off using a highly pigmented paint for better coverage. My favourite brand is DecoArt, in case that wasn’t obvious, and their standard acrylic paint line is called Americana. The other main one, which I’m not a huge fan of but it gets the job done too, is Delta’s Ceramcoat, although according to my mother who knows every single thing there is to know about every single kind of paint ever made, DecoArt’s Americana is more highly pigmented than Ceramcoat. Long story short: As long as you’re not using a cheapo store brand, you’re good. (And don’t ask me about Golden’s acrylics…I’ve never used them and probably never will because I think they’re overpriced and not worth the cost for what I do.)

So you’ve got your topcoat over your crackle medium and I hate to tell you this but you’re going to want to let this layer dry for a while, especially if it’s summer and humid. (Humidity really affects crackle medium, in fact when I’m using crackle medium in the summer, I use a hair dryer on the “warm” setting to speed up the drying process and to create bigger cracks because crackle medium doesn’t behave the same way in summer as it does in winter.) Honestly, unless I’m in a hurry and use the blow dryer, I leave this layer to dry over night and I put the canvas on my coffee table in my office which is right in front of the furnace so hot air is blowing in that general area. It’s perfectly okay to use the blow dryer though if you’re impatient, just make sure it’s on the “warm” or medium setting and you’re blowing on low or medium. Even with using the hair dryer though, it’s probably not going to dry completely, but it will speed things up and it doesn’t necessarily need to be bone dry for the next step. (But I prefer it to be.)

The next step is splatter painting! Fun right? Now the very first rule of splatter painting is that acrylic paint does NOT wash out, so make sure you wear something you don’t mind getting paint on because it’s inevitable that you will no matter how careful you are. It may only be one little speck, but it’ll happen. Trust me. Just about every single pair of pajama pants I own are covered in paint splatters because I generally paint in my pajamas.

Anyway, you need to make your “splatter mix”, which is equal parts acrylic paint, Golden’s Acrylic Glazing Liquid (which I’ll show you a picture of further down) and then enough water to thin the mixture to a specific consistency, which I’ll show you too. I make my splatter mixes in an old ice cube tray because you really don’t need very much:

The other thing you need for this part is a spray bottle full of water. I got my spray bottles at the dollar store for $0.50 each.

Now, for thinning your splatter mix with water, what I actually use for ADDING the water is actually kinda funny. You ready? I use a little eye-dropper type thing called an Aqua-Leash that came with Sea Monkeys. I used to be obsessed with Sea Monkeys and had like, 6 tanks going at once of them, so I’ve got a bunch of these little yellow and blue eye-dropper type things kicking around that work wonderfully for adding small amounts of water to things like splatter mixes. If you don’t have an eye-dropper (recommended) you can just use your tap to add water but do it very very very slowly, checking the consistency regularly. Really, you’re only going to be adding a few millimeters of water which is hard to do with the tap, so I highly recommend an eye-dropper or something similar. This is the consistency you’re striving for:

Add just enough water for it to drip slowly from the end of a paint brush. Getting the right consistency really just takes practice, honestly.

The next thing you’re going to do is spray your canvas with water so that when the paint hits the canvas, it’ll kind of melt a little bit, giving each splatter a softer edge. You want to have your spray bottle set on “spray” as opposed to “stream” and you want more than just a light layer of water but you don’t want to flood it either. This part takes practice too and even I add too little or too much half the time. In the case of this particular canvas, I actually added too much water in the middle and not enough around the edges, but even if you screw this part up, it’ll still end up looking good.

For splatter painting, don’t use your good brushes, use crappy ones (any shape, really) with long handles because what you’re going to be doing is putting paint on the bristles of the thinner brush and holding it over the canvas while tapping the brush with the handle of a heavier brush. Here are pictures and a short video on the process:

Now, here’s a little bit of splatter painting wisdom for you: if you have a dark colour and a lighter colour, do the lighter colour first because you can always add more of the lighter colour if you didn’t use it enough in the first place, whereas with the darker colour, if you use too much, you can’t exactly correct that, but you can tone it down by adding more of the lighter colour over top of the darker colour. Make sense?

Here’s the canvas after the splatters were added:

Because of all the water in this step, the canvas is going to have to dry over night. You DO NOT want to blow dry at this stage to speed things up because the force of the air will mix your colours all together and ruin your splatters. Again, I put my wet canvases on my coffee table in front of the furnace and they’re usually dry by the time I wake up. If it’s NOT dry by the time you wake up and isn’t exactly wet per se but tacky, THEN you can use the blow dryer to speed up the process if you want, but me, I just let them dry naturally at this stage to make sure I’m preserving the splatters.

Once the canvas is dry completely, you’re ready to do the final layer, which is the glitter. On this canvas, I used DecoArt’s “Craft Twinkles“, which is a glitter paint, (mixed with Glazing Liquid and water) but on other canvases I use dry glitter, which I’ll explain after the pictures.

So with the Craft Twinkles, you want to mix equal parts of it with Acrylic Glazing Liquid and then like, 10-15 drops of water, then mix with the end of a paint brush.

If you’re using dry glitter, I recommend Martha Stewart’s because it’s ultra fine,  super sparkly and I believe it comes in about 30 different colours (available at Michael’s and at some Wal*Marts). With dry glitter, you’re going to want to fill your ice cube tray about 1/3 (maybe a touch more) with glitter and enough Acrylic Glazing Liquid to give it more or less the consistency of paint, then add about 5-10 drops of water and mix with the end of a paint brush.

With these amounts, for both the Craft Twinkles and dry glitter, you’re going to make enough of the mixture to coat a 12×12 inch canvas, which is exactly what you’re going to do with it. Just take a large flat brush, probably the same brush you used for the white topcoat, and paint the whole canvas with your glitter mixture. Use all of it. If it’s a thick layer, hey, it’s just going to be that much more sparkly! Then let that dry overnight. (I don’t recommend the blow dryer for this part.)

Now you’re ready to add whatever it is you want to add to the painting, whether it’s a pretty girl or something else. Whatever you want on there, just do it. Once you’re finished and everything’s dry, you need to varnish, which is the key to making these paintings sparkly like the metallic finish on a car.

I use Triple Thick Gloss Glaze varnish by, you guessed it, DecoArt because I think this shit is awesome. It goes on very thick, dries fast, is non-yellowing and I always use two coats. (Make sure it dries between coats.) As the jar says, the finish is very glossy and it really makes the sparkles shine. I cannot praise this product enough, I love the stuff. I get paranoid they’ll discontinue it so every time I go to Michael’s, I grab two 8oz jars of it just in case. It also comes in a spray but I’ve never tried that. I’m sure it’s good too, though.

And that’s it! You now know all my secrets and can make sparkly paintings of your very own. :o) If you have any questions, feel free to post them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer.

Now, when I told people that I was going to do this tutorial, a couple said that I should add a “donate” button at the end, but honestly, I wouldn’t feel good about that, so if you found this tutorial useful and happen to have an Etsy account, just do me a favour and add my Etsy shop to your favourites so I can start gaining some street cred on that site since I’m brand spanking new over there. Thanks in advance! Happy glittering!