All of our art is made with acrylic paint that is mixed with a pouring medium to a very fluid consistency—hence the name fluid art.  It is also called pour painting.  We pour the paint on the canvas and something good happens to produce the art. 

Part of the goodness comes from chemistry.  The different paints we use have different densities, and when they mix on the canvas, they produce different effects.

The rest of the goodness comes from the artist.  It is easy to get cool effects.  It’s hard to get something with a subject.  The artist has a vision for the painting, and they have to guide the very fluid paint toward their vision.

A level 1 canvas is a lower end canvas.  The canvas is stretched over the frame and stapled to the back.  Level 2 and 3 canvases are higher end and use a thicker canvas.  They are gallery wrapped which results in a more professional appearance when you look at the back of the canvas. 

The frame on a level 1 and level 2 canvas is ¾ inches thick.  Level 3 frames are 1 ½ inches
thick, so it feels beefier. 

Curved canvases (round, oval, heart shaped) are not gallery
wrapped.  You need straight edges to do the gallery wrapping.

We try to make sure the type of canvas is identified in the listing.  If you don’t see it or have questions about canvas type, please ask.

We embellish some of our art to add more interest.  Hand painting is the most common type of embellishment.  We let the paint dry and then come back to add a subject or additional details.

We also add 3 dimensional items to embellish paintings.  In some cases, we cut paint skins to form different shapes.  We also outline shapes with hot glue and fill the interior with paint or pigments.  Once dry, we transfer the shape to the painting.

We have also cut vinyl into shapes to embellish our paintings.  This was our original embellishment method, and we only have a few of these left in inventory.

We use an art grade varnish to finish our paintings.  The varnish is designed to protect the paint from UV.

In 2023, we started applying an isolation coat prior to finishing, which isolates the paint from the finish.  The primary reason we use the isolation coat is to make our finishing process more reliable. We found that in the winter when indoor humidity is low the finishing process was unreliable.  One way this manifest was to create a crackle finish, typically over dark base colors.  We have a couple of paintings in our inventory where we liked the crackle finish with the painting and retained it.  We’ll try to annotate those
paintings so you can draw your own conclusions before purchasing.

We have occasionally used resin to finish paintings in the past.  More on resin below.

Resin creates a great looking finish.  But you need to be aware that getting resin perfect is impossible.  We have what amounts to a clean room in the basement where we do resin work.  We run air filters and wear full suits, gloves, mask, and hair net to control particulate in the room.  As a result, our resin turns out better than most we have seen.  But if a spec of dust gets on the surface when it is drying, it will cause a small dimple in the surface. 

The good news is you can’t see the imperfections unless you know what to look for.  The bad news is Kelly is a bit of a perfectionist, and it drives him crazy when it isn’t perfect (that’s why we have a clean room and procedures to minimize particulate).

We use three types of resin.  All are art grade.  This is important because UV will cause resin to yellow over time.  The art grade resin helps prevent this.  We have trivets that we have been using in our kitchen since 2020, and we cannot tell any difference between them and newly finished items.

We finish the painted area of all charcuterie (fancy cutting board) with a food safe resin.  It is good up to 120 degrees.  You cannot cut on it. 

We finish all of the trays, trivets, coasters, lazy susans and anything else not specifically mentioned is a high heat resin.  It is good to 475 degrees.  You cannot cut on it.  We know this because Julie’s Dad, repeatedly, used a trivet as a cutting board.  Up close it looks awful.  Interestingly, from 4-5 feet away it looks ok.

We finish tables in a high hardness resin.  It is good to 475 degrees.  We haven’t tested the hardness, but let’s go ahead and assume you cannot cut on it.

When we start a painting, we make sure all sides of the painting are covered with the base paint.  This serves two purposes.  First, it makes sure there is no unpainted canvas on the sides of the painting.  Second, paint does not move well over a dry surface.  So, it helps the paint run over the side of the painting.  When the painting is complete, the art extends over the sides of the painting.  Depending on the type of painting and what the artist is trying to achieve, a painting will have more or less of the art on the sides of the canvas.  To make a long story short, you can hang our art on your wall without a frame, and it will look like it was intended to be displayed that way.

However, the painting will almost certainly look better in a frame.  We have found the frames really elevate the art.  At this time, all of our frames are black.  Paintings with large areas of black negative space benefit the least from a black frame.  On the other end of the spectrum, there are a couple where the frame transforms the painting from a sleeper to something we are hesitant to part with.

We have discussed it and are not sure at this time.  The frames take a while to make.  They are a side interest and not what we really want to focus on.  So, we have been trying to avoid carrying a large frame inventory.  Having a single color makes it so they are more interchangeable, which means less inventory. 

The frames are made so the frame is 3/8 inch from the sides of the painting.  There are boards in the back the painting attaches to.  The back boards are painted black, which makes it look like the painting is floating inside the frame.

In order to keep the cost down, Kelly uses pine for the frame.  Pine is a soft wood, so you will need to be a little careful when transporting the frame. 

We put this FAQ in specifically so we could give a shout out to Fluid Art Company.  Fluid Art Company was created by artists to create products they needed.  All of their products were created with the artist in mind and work great.  We have also met and painted with the people behind Fluid Art Company.  They are great people that we really enjoyed interacting with.

Absolutely not.  We have way too much little stuff to put on the website.  We are planning to put a representative sample of our jewelry, trivets, etc on the website.  Our big concern is being able to send you exactly what you looked at on the website. To do that, we have to have a manageable level of inventory.  As we get better at this in the future, we may put more on the website.  In the meantime, feel free to ask if there colors you are looking for that you don’t see on the website.

We’ve seen some horror stories about shipping to other countries, even somewhere close like Canada. At this point, we are only open to shipping within the US.

There are many fluid art techniques, and we have tried most of them.  We try to use a variety of techniques.  There are a couple of reasons. First, it’s fun to see what you can get with the different techniques.  Second, we don’t want all of our art to look the same. 

Julie’s go to technique is a bloom.  Julie loves flowers, and blooms look like flowers.  You are trying to get an effect called lacing in blooms.  Blooms are the hardest technique, and getting blooms to scale to larger sizes is especially difficult. 

Kelly’s go to technique is a Dutch pour.  For a Dutch pour, you use very thin paint and
put a line of paint on the canvas.  You then use a hair dryer to blow the paint across the canvas.  Because the paint is very thin, the paint mixes to form new colors.  Dutch pours
tend to produce organic shapes.  The smaller the piece the harder it is to do a Dutch pour.  Kelly hates doing coasters and ornaments because there just isn’t enough space to work.

There are a number of techniques that involve layering paint in a container and then applying it to the canvas.  We tend to describe these as flip cups or dump cups.  These techniques tend to produce cells, which is one color popping out through another color.  Julie uses silicon oil and a torch to control where cells form.

A swipe involves putting paint on the canvas and using something to drag the paint across the canvas. The swipe color interacting with the colors below it creates interesting effects. 

Many of Julie’s landscapes are either a flip cup, a swipe, or a combination of a flip cup and a swipe. Kelly has used an open cup, which is a variant of a flip cup, to create galaxy pours.  And both Julie and Kelly have painted trees using a swipe technique.

A strainer pour uses something with a cavity to hold the paint and regularly spaced openings for the paint to flow out onto the canvas.  Strainer pours produce very symmetrical flowers.  The first painting Julie sold was a flower made this way. And the first really good painting Kelly made was using a variant of this technique called a reverse dip.

Honestly, it is just how we roll.  Kelly tends to go overboard, and Julie is very focused on presentation.  When you put the two of us together, this is where we end up.

We started with paintings. When we decided to try selling, Julie didn’t want to be one dimensional, and she wanted to have many different price points so more people could enjoy her art.  So, for our first show Julie made trays, trivets, coasters, and jewelry. 

And it wasn’t just making the items.  She had to do research to find sources for materials and to figure out how to finish the items.  Coasters is a good example.  She had painted some round wooden coasters, which she didn’t like because they weren’t heavy enough.  Tile is a good solution, but it comes in squares, and she doesn’t like squares. Round tile is hard to find, but she eventually found a source.  The tile came with cork to put on the bottom, but the cork seemed cheap.  So, Julie found a separate source for cork that met her standards.  That same saga plays out for every product we introduce.

Having the products available wasn’t the end of the process.  We also needed to display
them.  We’re pretty attached to all of our art, and we had to properly display it. Clearly, we couldn’t just stick it on a table.  We ended up buying grid walls to hang the paintings and wood shelving units to display the trays, trivets and coasters.  And, you would never put the price tag on the front of the painting.  So, Julie found price holders that attach to the grid wall.

Our test run to see if our art would sell ended up as a major production with a wide variety of products that were presented very professionally.  We have grown from there with more products and improvements to how we display.

Absolutely.  There are a couple of things to keep in mind.

First, the paint does what it does.  We cannot create an identical copy of something you have seen.  We do track the colors we use and the order we used to put colors on the piece.  That will generally allow us to get a similar look and feel.

Second, we price custom work the same as our normal work.  If you want a trivet in custom colors, it will cost the same as other trivets in our inventory.  The same goes for paintings, but it’s more complex.  Our pricing has changed over time.  We don’t reprice paintings because the pricing is tied to how good/experienced we were when we did the work. Additionally, pricing on paintings is per square inch.  So, if you are looking at a small painting we did 2 years ago and asking us to do something similar on a larger canvas, the pricing is going to look a lot different.  But it will be priced the same way any other painting of that size would be priced using our current pricing.

Third, since we price based on size, one way to manage cost is to use multiple smaller paintings and space them out on the wall.  When we paint multiple panels that will be displayed together, we put them next to each other and paint them simultaneously.  That way there is continuity between the panels.