Soak-stain painting is a painting technique famously used in Colour Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction, two types of Abstract Expressionist painting. In this method of applying paint, the diluted paint soaks into the weave of the canvas or paper and becomes part of it, rather than sitting on the surface. It has a distinctive look and there’s a balance between learning how to control it and acceptance of the flow of the paint. The focus of soak-stain painting is on colour.
When trying this technique with water-based acrylic paint you will find that the diluted paint beads up on the surface rather than flowing and staining. You can scrub it with a brush to break the surface tension, which can give an uncontrolled, patchy flow. Or you can use a wetting agent, either added to the paint or applied to the canvas. This will allow the paint to flow in a more controlled, even manner. We compare two brands of wetting agent and look at some methods for successful acrylic soak-stain painting.
Acrylic Soak-Stain Painting
The Early History of Soak-Stain Painting
Helen Frankenthaler was a pioneer of soak-stain painting in the 1940’s. When she created her method she used thinned oil paint and poured it across a large unprimed cotton canvas on the floor. Later she began using the newly developed acrylic paints, which were solvent-based. Later she used water-borne acrylics, which are the paint best suited to this technique because the paint doesn’t cause the canvas to deteriorate over time like oil and solvents do.
Other Colour Field painters using the soak-stain technique included Morris Lewis and Sam Gilliam. Colour Field paintings are usually large because the artist wants to fill your field of vision with colour when you stand in front of them. Lyrical Abstraction paintings can be smaller and may have representational elements, but are still process led, with an overall pattern, and no single centre of interest. It can be considered the second wave of Colour Field painting. You can read more about Frankenthaler in our article Recreating the Colour Palette of Helen Frankenthaler.
Choose the Method and Materials to Get the Result You’re After
Soak-stain painting is a combination of immediate playfulness, and slow patience while you wait to see how the paint seeps over time and how it changes when it dries. It is usually done flat on the table or floor; on unstretched cotton or linen canvas or heavyweight cotton paper; all unprimed. Paint is thinned with water to the consistency of ink, or even thinner. It can be poured on and left to seep along the fibres or tilted to encourage it to move faster in a particular direction. It can be brushed on and left to spread before brushing on more paint. You can work on dry canvas, canvas wetted with just water, or with a wetting agent. These will each give you different results. Wetting agent allows a more controlled and smoother flow of the colour. How wet your canvas is – from sopping wet to just damp – will make a huge difference to the outcome. You can pre-wash or pre-wet your canvas to pre-shrink it so that it doesn’t buckle when you paint, and then let it dry before you work on it.
Your paints will behave differently depending on how thinned they are, if they contain multiple pigments or metallic colourants, or if you’ve added a wetting agent. You can paint all at once or in stages or layers, letting it dry in between. You can make staining just part of the process of a painting. For instance, you can make a stain painting that emphasises mistiness for an out-of-focus background that implies distance in a landscape, then stretch the canvas and paint in a focussed foreground. It can look like a washy, flowing watercolour or like a saturated, layered, geometric composition. It all depends on how you treat your surface and your paints.
Paint beading up on the canvas, without a wetting agent.
Left to right: Jackson’s Eco Paper 200 lb, 12-ounce cotton duck canvas, Italian linen canvas.
Surfaces for Acrylic Soak-Stain Painting
I tested and painted on three types of surfaces:
- Jackson’s 12-ounce cotton duck canvas
- CL548 which is a mid-weight linen canvas
- Jackson’s Eco Paper 200 lb.
The wetted areas shrink immediately as the cotton swells and threads pull together. This created wrinkles in the un-wetted area.
Shrinkage and Cockling
Because the paints are thinned with a lot of water, the surface will react by cockling as some parts swell and shrink and some parts don’t. And the overall size of your canvas will change as the piece of canvas shrinks.
Jackson’s Eco paper 200 lb was a great surface for painting with lots of water.
Paper
All paper will cockle when wetted but unlike canvas, it will not shrink in size overall. The Jackson’s Eco Paper 200 lb was a great paper to work on with this much water. It is very substantial. Mixtures of more than one pigment can separate and create interesting effects in the texture. The paper is heavy enough that it almost doesn’t cockle. Wetting it all over evenly helps to prevent cockling, too. If you have lighter-weight paper, you could try wetting and stretching as you do for watercolour, but with this paper I didn’t need to do that.
The Jackson’s Eco paper 200 lb is substantial and the texture gives a place for pigments to settle.
The flow and texture on the Eco paper was lovely.
Canvas
If paint is poured or brushed on part of the canvas and a section left unpainted, the wet part will shrink and the canvas will cockle and be very wavy. So there are two things to consider: how to flatten a very wavy canvas (unless you want the cockling to be part of the work) and how to account for the canvas size becoming smaller.
Cotton canvas. The first two pieces were cut with the long side going with the weft. The first is un-wetted, the second was gently washed and has shrunk in length. The third and fourth were cut across the roll, so they have shrunk in width, instead of length. The last one frayed a lot because it was washed on a long cycle with lots of agitation.
Canvas permanently shrinks when it gets wet. It shrinks more in one direction than another. It’s about 10% in the direction of the warp threads and 2-5% across the grain (called the weft). You can’t really tell which is which on a cut piece of canvas unless it includes a selvedge, which is the edge that is woven so that it won’t fray. The warp is the threads that are going in the direction parallel to the selvedge, the long way on a 10 m roll of canvas.
The watery acrylic paint was brushed onto dry linen canvas. The painted area shrank and the unpainted areas became wavy.
Selvedge edges on linen canvas.
Shrinkage of canvas in advance or when wetted on the table needs to be taken into account, especially if you will later be stretching the canvas to a particular set of stretcher bars. A 100 x 100 cm piece of canvas will shrink to 90 x 97 cm, so if you want your finished unstretched painting to be 100 x 100 cm you’ll need to add 10% to the length when you cut your piece. I used 42 x 30 cm pieces of canvas for testing, some were cut with the 42 cm across the roll and some with the 42 cm along the roll. So some shrank to 38 x 29 cm which is a more square shape and some shrank to 27 x 41 cm which made the shape even more narrow.
Linen canvas wetted with water and patted dry before paint applied.
Linen
Water doesn’t bead up on linen as it does on cotton duck. Linen is harder than cotton to get paint to flow on unless it’s damp, maybe because the threads are further apart. I wetted the linen with water and patted it dry. I then thinned red with water, pink with water and Golden Wetting Aid, green with water and Liquitex Flow Aid. Everything seemed to flow equally well, unlike on cotton. So, linen is absorbent enough without any wetting agent. Note, the repelling of each other that happens with the green and the pink in the bottom right corner. This might be an interesting use of wetting agent on linen after some experimentation.
This is the same painting wet. Besides the linen getting lighter the main change is that the white in the pink becomes less apparent. More on this white phenomenon later.
Pre-washing the Canvas
I tried wetting the cotton canvas with cold water sprayed and brushed on, washing the canvas in a short, cold water, rinse cycle in the washing machine, with and without detergent, and a longer hot water setting. There was no difference in shrinkage. The canvas shrank the same from getting cold water poured on it as getting a hot water machine wash. The only difference was that adding detergent removed the starch sizing used on the threads in the weaving process, making it as absorbent as blotting paper and hard to move any paint around, so I don’t recommend it. The long, hot cycle frayed 1 cm of threads along all edges. I tried wetting the linen canvas with cold water, and gently hand-rinsing it, and it shrank about the same amount as the cotton. I tried stapling down canvas to a board to stop it from cockling, but the wet parts still shrank about the same as the ones I didn’t staple, so it still wrinkled.
The canvas corners will often curl up as it is absorbing water and can be smoothed back down while it’s wet. If they are still sticking up just a bit you can hold the corners down with small objects while it relaxes flat.
Another benefit of pre-washing the canvas, by hand or in the machine, is to clean it. Dust and fibres on the surface will clump or puddle up in the paint or can leave tide marks. You can also smooth out fold marks while it’s wet, by rubbing it or pulling it out flat on the board you’re working on. I tried ironing it with a steam iron which unexpectedly gave a slight texture similar to cold-pressed watercolour paper.
Rinsing the canvas helps get it fully wet and gives it a light cleaning which help prevent tide marks.
If you haven’t pre-shrunk the canvas, and you only paint on some areas of the canvas and it cockles, wait until the paint is fully dry, and wet the whole canvas (a spray bottle is easiest). It will shrink to match the painted area and be flat again. It will also be 10% shorter in the warp direction.
On un-shrunk canvas, the unpainted areas can cockle.
Simply spraying the whole painting with water will make the unpainted areas shrink to fit with the rest, and flatten out the whole piece.
Fraying
The edges of unstretched pieces of cotton canvas fray a bit. But the weave is tight enough that after you pull a few threads and trim the rest it’s pretty stable. The looser weave on linen frays more easily and you get more fringe. Linen frays a lot even with gentle hand washing, so unless you sew the edge to prevent fraying, it’s best not to wash it in the washing machine.
Stretching your Painting
If you will be stretching your finished canvas onto stretcher bars, you may want to leave a border of unpainted canvas the amount of the thickness of your stretcher bars plus 3-5 cm for pulling around to the back. This way you won’t lose any of your painting because it will all be on the front surface. Measure this after wetting and shrinking. There is a complication; the warp threads that shrank so much are now stretchy when they weren’t before. When stretching the canvas taut they seem to come back about half the shrunk distance. The canvas does not stay half shrunk after it has been pulled, but springs back to the new shrunken size when it’s released. But you may want to take this amount into consideration when stretching. Pay attention the first time you do it and keep track of shrinkage and stretch-back for next time.
Leaving a border around the painting for stretching.
Stretching canvas is simple after you do it a few times. We have a helpful blog article on How To Stretch Canvas.
Once stretched, the painting can more easily be displayed. This painting didn’t have a wide enough border to prevent some of the painting being pulled around to the side of the stretcher bars. If framed, you won’t be able to see this and so you might consider this part of the painting lost. If you are hanging without a frame you may or may not prefer to have part of the painting extending onto the side.
Can You Stain Paint on a Primed Canvas?
Primed Canvas
Because all of the very fluid paint stays on top of a primed canvas, it runs everywhere really fast. And if the canvas isn’t completely level it can run off the side. All the colours also run together and mix very quickly. But after the water has evaporated parts of the thin areas of paint are very thin and the weave shows and it looks a bit like a stain painting. But most of the surface doesn’t. And all that water means the binder is spread out too far and the bit of binder that there is can craze. On the blue, red, and yellow rectangle paintings below you can see that adding wetting agent to the paints does change how they look even on a primed surface.
On unprimed canvas, the water soaks in. So there is not much running on the surface. And the colour moves slowly, seeping by capillary action. It’s much easier to control. And the pigment sinks into the fibres and adheres without the need for much binder.
Trying to do stain painting on a primed canvas. The surface is not the same.
You can see the crazing in the blue area.
Absorbent Ground
On a primed canvas, with two coats of absorbent ground on top, the paint runs less quickly than a plain primed canvas, so it’s more controllable. But it still acts more like a primed canvas. And it looks like a primed canvas in the unpainted areas and you get the brightness of white shining through the transparent colours. Perhaps more coats of absorbent ground would improve the absorbency.
No wetting agent on the surfaces. The two unstretched canvases were damp with water. The two stretched canvases were dry. Blue was mixed with just water, magenta with Golden, yellow with Liquitex. The blue granulation might be because it is a mix with titanium white and they are separating. Left to right: linen, cotton, primed canvas, absorbent ground on primed canvas.
Preparing the Paint for Soak-Stain Painting
Diluting the Colour
With soak-stain painting, the goal is for the paint to penetrate the canvas or paper fibres like a dye, not sit on top. The appearance is soft-focus and matt, not hard or shiny. You will need to use acrylic inks or dilute your acrylics to the fluidity of ink For this to happen. Fluid or soft body acrylic becomes very fluid, like ink, with three parts water to one part paint. So, mark your jar/bottle into fourths and put ¼ paint and ¾ water and mix well. Heavy body becomes very fluid like ink at about 12:1. Inks can be diluted even further. Helen Frankenthaler is said to have added a tablespoon of heavy body acrylic to a gallon of water (about four litres), which is very thin!
If you are using wetting agent, you may not wish to start with paint that is already very fluid like ink. Adding diluted wetting agent to already diluted paints makes the paint more diluted. This is fine if you want less pigment for a transparent layer or if you want very fluid paint. But if you don’t want it too watery you can thin heavy body paint with just diluted wetting agent and not first with water. It makes a nice viscosity and you have the right amount of wetting agent in your paint.
I used small squeeze bottles and cups with a pipette for pouring and dropping colour onto the wetting agent on the surface, or brushes and a palette with wells for mixing up paints to brush on.
Wet-to-Dry Colour Shift
At first I thought all the colours became lighter as they dried, but sometimes they dried either similar to the wet colour or darker, as acrylics usually do. So I now think that differing amounts of wetting agent affect the wet-to-dry colour shift of acrylic. By pulling the colour to the back in one spot which can keep it dark in that spot, or by spreading it out in lots of little fingers that then dry lighter. So you may want to pay attention to how this works for you when you first try it.
White
White acts different to all the other colours. Mixing in Titanium White or layering it over the top, helps create a soft focus, dulled background. You can add white on top of a magenta area of wet paint and scrub it into the wet colour on the surface to lighten it. But don’t get excited when the white looks great on its own. When it dries the white will mostly disappear. Designs squirted on in white practically vanish.
I planned for this one to be a background to a landscape. The cotton canvas was wetted with water and then the left half had some diluted Golden Wetting Aid added and the right half had Liquitex Flow Aid. Because it was already wetted, the wetting agent spread further but were more diluted. While it was still wet, white was scrubbed in to dull and diffuse the colours.
Some paint soaked through to the back. A little more on the Golden side.
The canvas had been well saturated with Golden Wetting Aid. Then paint dropped on. This is the painting wet.
The same painting after the acrylic has seeped more into the fibres and then dried overnight. The white is virtually gone. The same thing happened to the white using Liquitex Flow Aid and using plain water.
Canvas fully wetted then colour dropped on. Left: diluted Golden Wetting Aid. Centre: Diluted Liquitex Flow Aid. Right: water.
It is hard to know when the water-wetted canvas is evenly wetted. I scrubbed it in, let it sit to soak in, blotted it dry so there were no puddles, and sprayed it again lightly. It wasn’t evenly wet in the end. You can see here that this one has areas where the paint didn’t spread at all, where the white dots are.
Metallic Acrylics
The iridescent metal colours do not penetrate the fibres like the pigments do, so they don’t have the same appearance of staining because they sit on top. They need to be more fluid when applied or they don’t move. High Flow consistency isn’t thin enough to flow in the metallics, and if used with just water they are removable when dry. They are permanent with a wetting agent, probably because they penetrate the surface more.
Binder
Even though there’s little binder to hold the paint in place, the colour doesn’t run when it’s re-wetted – it is in the fibres. Acrylic inks/high flow have the full amount of acrylic binder as any acrylic paint even though they are very fluid, but water-thinned heavy body acrylics don’t have the right percentage of binder anymore. But on unprimed paper and canvas, with the staining technique, both the acrylic inks and the heavily thinned heavy body paints, are fairly permanently in the fibres.
Drying Times
If you are layering colours or painting in stages where you are waiting for the painting to dry, be aware that wetting agent slows down drying. I find that a fan is a useful tool. A heater or heat gun is usually too hot and can cause the acrylic to dry on the surface too quickly so that when the rest of the paint dries the skin cracks or crazes. This slower drying might also help the surface become evenly wet, because parts aren’t drying too soon.
The two areas with wetting agent are still wet, while the linen and the blue area with just water, have already dried.
The Wetting Agents
Although it sounds like a ‘wetting agent’ is used to keep your paints wet on the palette, it is a chemistry term used for things that help liquids flow or penetrate better, so the surface will get evenly wet. It is not to be confused with slowing the drying-out of acrylic paint on your palette. There are ways to do that, but not with a wetting agent.
The surface tension of water causes a watery wash of acrylic to bead up or pool into a puddle with a thick edge, so it can roll around on the surface and doesn’t flow smoothly where you want it to go. Adding a wetting agent liquid to either your watery paint or brushing it onto your painting surface first, will break the surface tension and your colour can flow and spread. Using a lot of water in a puddle can also let the colour spread, but all of your colours will mix and the puddle will run unevenly.
Chemically, a wetting agent is a surfactant, which is one of the ingredients in washing up liquid and dishwasher rinse aid. But it is concentrated, you just need a drop in a lot of water and it doesn’t contain the unwanted other ingredients of washing up liquid. But in a pinch, you could experiment with adding a tiny amount of washing-up liquid to your acrylic colour wash.
Note: A wetting agent is also useful for wetting pigment powders so that they blend more easily with water or acrylic binder when making your own acrylic paints.
A bead of paint.
Breaking the surface tension by adding a drop of diluted wetting agent.
Dilution
The two brands of wetting agent both come as concentrates with recommended dilutions. They warn that using it less diluted will result in the painting not drying properly and remaining sticky. The usual method is to make up a big bottle of diluted wetting agent, label it, and use it only from that container. Every time I mention adding wetting agent I am always talking about diluted agent. Never add concentrated wetting agent to your paints or your canvas.
Golden Wetting Aid (formerly called Flow Release)
Dilution: 1:30 which is 33 ml of Wetting Aid in one litre of water. So the 118 ml bottle of concentrate makes 3.5 litres.
Liquitex Professional Flow Aid
Dilution: 1:20 which is 50 ml of Flow Aid in one litre of water. So a 118 ml bottle of concentrate makes 2.3 litres.
I expected the two wetting agent brands to be basically the same, but they are really different.
You may need to use more of the diluted Golden Wetting Aid when you’re wetting your surface to cover it all. It soaks all the way to the back of the canvas and it soaks so quickly that it’s hard to brush out.
The diluted Liquitex Professional Flow Aid spreads slower than Golden Wetting Aid. This can be an advantage because it can be brushed out before it soaks through. It beads up on the surface and this also means it can be brushed and spread out before it soaks to the back.
At one point I preferred the Golden Wetting Aid for putting on the canvas and the Liquitex Professional Flow Aid for mixing with paint. But later decided it was the opposite. I tried a few different methods of painting, so it will depend on what you are trying to achieve.
On paper, it was the opposite of on canvas – the Liquitex Professional Flow Aid was hard-edged and controllable and the Golden Wetting Aid flowed more and made big blossoms.
Dried wetting agent on a surface can be re-wetted for the next layer. It does not work to spread paint when it is dry on the surface, but will reactivate when you brush on some water. I wondered if, because of this, dried paint would come off the surface when it was wetted again, but it doesn’t. I wet it and scrubbed it and the paint was set.
Coating the Canvas With a Wetting Agent vs. Just Water
It takes time for water to penetrate the canvas and wet it thoroughly – it soaks in eventually after about an hour if you keep re-wetting it. The Liquitex beads up even on water-soaked canvas. So it has to be brushed out, but that works fine. Golden does not bead up, it soaks in instantly where you put it and is hard to move with the brush. So it can leave the shape of your original line or dot of application, that you sometimes can’t get rid of. It’s hard to get the Golden to spread unless the canvas is already wet, so you end up using a lot to get the whole area covered. And you get different results when you use different amounts.
If you work water into the canvas and then apply the wetting agent it helps the wetting agent spread more easily and cover farther, but it also dilutes it more. So it’s only a little different from just using plain water. If using water only on the surface, and you want to control the spread, let it soak in, pour off the excess, and work on it damp but not drippy. It also depends on what effect you are trying to achieve.
The water patch on the left kept spreading until it touched the Golden patch in the centre. The Golden and the Liquitex kept their shape more.
Left to right: Liquitex, Golden, water. Applied with a fine tip squeeze bottle and brushed out afterwards. The Golden brushed out the least.
Applying Paint on Wetted Canvas: The Difference Between Just Water, and the Two Wetting Agents
Paint applied on canvas wetted with Liquitex flows further than Golden. With Golden, the edges soften but the colour sinks in so it doesn’t spread as much, so there’s a lot of colour on the back of the canvas. The colour spreads slowly but if there was enough Golden applied it was pretty far after an hour. Because Golden sucks paint to the back, you can find that you keep adding more paint and as it sinks in you keep adding more paint and it keeps being drawn in. Then you find that all the paint is on the table behind your canvas. You may want to instead let it dry and re-wet it and continue later.
On just water-wetted canvas, paint spreads instantly and the most, sometimes with long, feathery fingers, and can spread all the way to the edge of the wetted area. It stays more on top of the canvas, so the colour is stronger. Unless you really saturate it with paint, none soaks through to the back.
I find the back more interesting sometimes than the front. Sometimes this might be because the whites have all soaked through to the back. Whites sink through when a wetting agent is added to the paint just like it does when white is painted on top of wetting agent.
The paint on the Liquitex wetting agent spread out when the board with the canvas was left tilted at a 45-degree angle. On water, it spread down. On the Golden it barely spread. The Golden usually pulls the colour in, to the back of the canvas, so it keeps a painted shape better and doesn’t spread out as much.
For my first test, I painted water in a patch in the upper left, Golden Wetting Aid in the upper right, and then tried to spread it but it wouldn’t move. I then trailed purple through them both in a thin line. The water spread immediately, while the Golden took a few minutes.
I also painted a patch of Golden at the bottom and trailed a line of purple and a line of copper through it.
After a few minutes this was how far things spread.
They both look about as strong on the front but the water patch didn’t soak any through to the back.
The Golden patch soaked all the way through to the table.
The top two strokes are on dry canvas, the top one with a second stroke of a wet brush. Below is a stroke painted on a patch of water. On the right top is a stroke painted into a patch of Golden and the bottom right into a patch of Liquitex. All just painted and shown wet.
Merging flowing shapes with different amounts of water and wetting agent on them. For this type of painting – adding more colour, scrubbing it in, waiting and adding more and keeping it wet, there wasn’t much difference between plain water and different amounts of either wetting agent.
The reverse sides of the same paintings shows that more paint was used on some than others, as some was sucked to the back.
Surface treatments left to right: 15 ml diluted Liquitex, 15 ml diluted Golden, water only, water plus 2 ml diluted Liquitex, water plus 2 ml diluted Golden.
On Linen
Water doesn’t bead up on linen like it does on cotton. But a wetting agent can still be useful for controlling the spread of the colour and making the edges of the flow smoother. The weave is so loose that it helps for it to be on a waterproof board, because much of the paint goes through the loose weave onto the board.
In some instances, especially if the canvas had Golden Wetting Aid on it and I kept adding more paint to the same spot, there would be paint on both the back of the cotton canvas and the table it was painted on. But with the linen, it took nothing extra and not much paint to penetrate the loose weave and soak to the back. I always painted on a layer of plastic. This is the linen piece turned over to the back, where there was more paint than on the front.
Wetting Agents On Paper
On the Jackson’s Eco Paper 200 lb. I repeated the same painting six times on different surface treatments. The paints were diluted with just water and applied with a fine tip squeeze bottle.
Surface treatments left to right:
1. Golden Wetting Aid
2. Liquitex Flow Aid
3. Water
4. The original five colours and shapes on dry paper. Note that the brown has run into the yellow and mostly hidden it.
5. Water left to dry a bit so not sopping wet.
6. Using a wet brush to stroke the marks on dry paper.
Stain paintings on cotton canvas.
The Soak-Stain Painting Process
With a wetting agent on the surface, the applied paint spreads but not in a puddle. With water, there is a puddle on the surface that moves easily. So the colours mix more and you must be careful that it doesn’t all roll off/pour off on one side, so you must keep it level.
If using just water, brush the water onto the surface and get it evenly wet. Wait for it to absorb. It’s hard to get an evenly wet surface with just water, unless it’s dripping wet, which is not useful for most kinds of soak-stain painting. So it helps to have at least some wetting agent on the surface.
It works well to wet your whole piece, let it shrink (which happens instantly), and smooth it flat. Then if you are working on wet canvas, start working straight away. You can add the diluted wetting agent, if you will be using it, to the damp canvas as the water helps it spread more evenly (especially with the Golden). You can also decide how much wetting agent you want to use on the surface – different amounts will cause the paint to flow differently. Or you can let the canvas dry flat and add the wetting agent later so you can control where it is, if you want it just in certain shapes.
You can add your colour using a dropper, by pouring from a cup or by brushing paint from a palette. During the painting process, you can add drops of diluted wetting agent that will disperse the paint.
If you will be working on dry canvas, then still wet the canvas and flatten it out but leave it to dry.
Colour Separation
If your colours are a mixture of pigments, either in the tube/bottle or because you’ve mixed a colour yourself, the lighter-weight one may rise and float and your colour will look different as it dries. Colour that you drop on may leave a trace of the original lines or drops, even if you brush it out straight away.
Depending on what you are trying to achieve – floating colour that separates, flowing stains, soaking, interesting lacey edges and borders, puddles and runs mixing colours, a contrast between wet and dry applied areas, and more – you may want painted-on strokes that stay mostly unchanged or a flowing mixing pattern.
An interesting thing I noticed: Placing objects on the wet paint and leaving them, leaves an imprint, like a ring from the bottom of an ink jar.
Here are three ways to achieve different results. Other combinations of wet or dry surface; wetting agent on the surface, in the paint or added as you go; and a variety of methods of applying the paint, will give you a variety of results.
A Flowing Soak-Stain Painting Technique
1. Gently wash the canvas with cold water by hand or machine without soap. Spread the wet canvas out perfectly flat on a horizontal surface. Or thoroughly wet the canvas and scrub the surface with a stiff brush or scrub brush and let it sit on a flat surface until it turns darker yellow, showing that it’s fully wetted.
2. Prepare all acrylics by diluting with water to the consistency of ink, or just use acrylic inks. You can have your colours in a palette with wells, or jars, or cups, or squeeze bottles.
3. Prepare a dilution of a wetting aid.
4. Add more water to the surface when you’re ready to start. Using a spray bottle makes it easier.
5. Pour on the colour and tilt. Add a few drops of diluted wetting agent if the colour is not flowing smoothly. Use brushes, tilting, or spraying water to move the colour around. Add more colour as needed.
Very fluid colour dropped onto a soaked wet canvas with some Liquitex Flow Aid added.
6. Let dry and assess if you need to wet the surface again and do more painting.
Working on a flowing painting.
A Soak-Stain Painting Technique With Separate Shapes
1. Same as above but let the flat canvas dry completely, to work on it the next day.
2. Prepare your acrylics by thinning them with a diluted wetting agent.
3. Paint your shapes on the dry canvas and observe how they are flowing. Add more shapes and colours, paying attention to any that you don’t want to flow together.
4. Stop when your shapes are mixing too much. Let it dry and continue. You can overlap transparent colours to create visual mixes, if the first colour is dry.
A Combination Of Flowing and Separate Shapes Soak-Stain Painting Technique
1. Gently wash the canvas with cold water by hand or machine without soap. Spread the wet canvas out perfectly flat on a horizontal surface to dry until the next day. Prepare a dilution of a wetting aid. Then thoroughly soak the canvas with diluted wetting agent, as evenly as you can.
2. Prepare your acrylics by thinning them with the diluted wetting agent.
3. Paint on your colour and wait to see how it flows. Colours may mix.
Soaked with Golden Wetting Aid on the left side and Liquitex Flow Aid on the right side. With a dry gap in the middle. This shows the wet painting.
4. Let dry and assess if you need to wet the surface again and do more painting.
The same painting dry. You can wet the surface and reactivate any exposed wetting agent, and continue painting.
Further Reading
How to Stretch Canvas: a Visual Guide
Golden SoFlat Matt Acrylic for Hard Edge Abstract Painting
Artist Review of Jackson’s Museum Stretched Canvas
Acrylic Painting, Microplastics and the Environment
Shop Acrylic Painting on jacksonsart.com
What an amazing and comprehensive article.
As I was reading I was thinking “but what if
you do ‘X'” and then further down you would
address that. This must have been a
painstaking process to devise and then
document each process and then begin the
difficult task of writing the results clearly
and concisely. Well done, indeed! I hate
working on canvas so don’t know that I’d
ever do this style of painting, but I love
discovering new techniques of any kind and
appreciate the technical detail. It’s amazing
how often some technical detail may come
in handy in another context.
I paint with acrylic inks. Initially when I
started I experimented with how traditional
watercolour wet-in-wet techniques would
work. I found on paper that I needed to have
the paper virtually saturated to get really
good bleeds, but the results were amazing
provided you worked very quickly. I then
experimented with absorbent ground on
panel with the ground sanded to provide a
very smooth surface. I tested the golden
watercolour ground vs 1/3 moulding
paste:2/3 golden hard sandable gesso vs 1/3
moulding paste:2.3 thick gesso (atelier
brand). Of the three the golden watercolour
ground gave the worst results. The colour
didn’t bleed when working wet in wet and
when working dry I got horrible feathering on
fine lines. The best result was with the
moulding paste/thick gesso and I was
ecstatic that for once the best performer
was also the cheapest. It’s a glorious
surface that allows me to do big watery
washes and bleeds and also do fine detail.
Thank you! I try to answer every question I can think of!
I’m glad you might find some of the techniques transferable.
I want to try your preferred absorbent surface, but I didn’t quite understand. Is it a mixture of 2 parts moulding paste and 1 part thick gesso, that you were referring to, or just moulding paste?
Thanks Julie. This is everything I needed
to know about soak stain. I wish I had
read this first but have discovered most
through trial and error. I hadn’t factored
in the shrinkage so it’s good to have that
detail. A great and thorough article,
really informative except you forgot to
mention how much fun this technique is!
Thanks, Alison! It’s great to have confirmation from an experienced painter, that you’ve had the same results!
And yes, it is fun, isn’t it!
Very useful and informative Julie – inspiring
too. I am working mostly on paper with
watered down acrylics and love the element
of chance involved. Keeps you on your toes!
Thank you, Patrick!
Glad to hear you found it useful.
I love the balancing of control and chance when working with very fluid paint!