IT'S ACRYLIC PAINT! After going back again and again to Golden Paints and other tutorials, I taught myself to make acrylic skins. What, you ask, is an acrylic skin? Well, it's acrylic paint and a pouring medium that you pour onto a substrate like butcher paper so that when the paint dries, you can peel the "skin" off the paper, and what you have is acrylic standing on its own, all by itself, crying out to be, if not on a canvas, part of something.I was pleased with my first try at pouring an acrylic skin; the colors were beautiful. There was only one hitch, I couldn't peel it off the plastic backing I was using (next time, butcher paper). Not to be deterred, I used the paint with the plastic backing it was dragging along and put a section of it inside a large PMC pendant I had made - based on a template from Gordon Uyehara's useful book, Metal Clay Fusion. (Photo on upper right.)
Eureka, it looks like enamel! I used another bit with a smaller pendant, and it took like a champ to being riveted as part of an acrylic sandwich between two pieces of metal clay (photo on right below). I'm hooked. I see many more and varied acrylic skins in my future, to use not only with jewelry but also with my mixed media pieces. Stay tuned.
