So up to earlier this year, if you wanted to use silicone in your paint pouring, then you just went out and bought silicone oil that was designed for use elsewhere, most usually silicone treadmill oil which comes in small bottles in liquid form.
You could also buy spray silicone oil which also worked well enough but was not specifically designed for use in acrylic paint pouring.
However, these days paint pouring has become very popular, due to how accessible it is to anyone who is interested in creating their own art pieces, and essentially can be done by anyone with the right materials.
Following this increase in popularity, a number of manufacturers in the US have come up with silicone products that have been specifically designed with paint pouring in mind. They are made up of the ideal viscosity of oil and usually come with an easy squeeze bottle top so that you can control exactly how much oil to put into your paint. This is really useful as you might only want to add a few drops which can be a bit tricky to control from an open bottle.
There are different weights and thicknesses of silicone oil that you can get and the manufacturers have figured out what is the best weight and thickness to use for your paintings, so these could be the ideal products to use.
The acrylic silicone oil is purported to be compatible with other pouring mediums (and there is no reason why they shouldn’t be) like Liquitex Pouring Medium and Floetrol, both of which are often used in creating fluid art, so they may well be worth a try.
As we are based in the UK at Fluid Acrylics, we are not able to get hold of them to try them out. I see absolutely no reason why they wouldn’t work just as well as treadmill lubricant but it does sound useful to have the squeezy top to apply the oil with. Having said that, you can also get some of the treadmill lubricant with a squeezy top too!
In terms of price, the acrylic silicone oil looks to be slightly more expensive than the treadmill lubricant, but not massively. If it is designed with pouring in mind and if it is maybe a slightly different viscosity then that might make for better cells so if it comes over to the UK then we will definitely give it a try.
If anyone has tried both the standard treadmill oil and the acrylic pouring oil then we would be interested to hear your feedback!
Some of the new acrylic pouring oils that are available on Amazon* are Acrylic Pouring Oil by Impresa
