If you have been following what is happening with acrylic pouring recently then you can’t fail to have seen the beautiful chameleon cell pours that people are now doing. This technique (I believe) was first done by Ali Saren aka chameleonjones_art on Instagram and in my opinion no one has ever matched her fantastic paintings using this technique. It involves doing a swipe painting and then inserting silicone drops into the painting. My favourite one of hers is embedded below from her instagram page:
In the beginning, people were trying to guess how she managed to achieve this technique and eventually people cottoned on and you can now see quite a few pictures and videos on Instagram and youTube about using the silicone, dropped on to a swipe painting to create the regular shaped cells.
I have to say I have tried this technique a couple of times so far without much success. I think I may have had my paints a bit too thick by the sounds of things and also most of my paint has floetrol added to it so that may also have been an issue.
I’m not sure if I will try too much more to get this technique right because I have too much going on with my wave paintings at present but it would be interesting to see if many other people have had success (and not just cells appearing, but actually clean looking ones!) as a lot of the ones I have seen on YouTube have not looked as good as the one above.
I guess the other thing to think about when using silicone is that it is not archival, although I believe that once something is sealed under resin I’m not sure that there can be any deterioration, but that is just my opinion. Also it is actually quite difficult to apply resin over paintings with silicone in as they need to be cleaned really well beforehand.
If I do get any success with the chameleon cells in future then I will post the video but that may be some time! In the meantime this is one of the best ones I have seen on YouTube and they do have quite a few nice videos on their channel so worth taking a look.