HOW TO CREATE - BEAUTIFUL ACRYLIC FLOWERS WITH CHAIN PULL TECHNIQUE

Hello, I'm Crafty Patty, and as you can see, I've been having fun doing some painting with acrylic and chains. You don't have to be an artist to do this, and I will show you some different ways to make different flowers, how to make the leaves, and how to add a background with a floor plan to give it a little bit more dimension. This particular piece isn't exactly what I was planning on ending up with. It's a masterpiece, but it's showing you techniques that will allow you to make your masterpiece with acrylic paint and chains. So here's some different types of chain that I'm gonna have fun playing around with. This one I found at Canadian Tire in the plumbing section, and it is called beaded chain, and this particular one comes in a 15-inch length. So I have joined a couple of them together to get this one. So now I've got about 30 inches. These four chains I found at my lumber yard. So look for a store that will sell chain by the foot. Again, they had a smaller version of the beaded chain, and this one I was able to cut by feet, so I cut three feet of this, and this was about a dollar a foot. And then I found this one, which might be kind of fun, and it's a bigger chain, and it looks like this. And here's another one, and this one is really big. The other place you can have fun looking is the dollar store. I found this necklace for $2.50, and it has some different chains in there as well. And here's another one from the dollar store, and it's a finer chain. And these necklaces from the dollar store, I'm just taking them off the hoops and stuff just with a pair of pliers. You can just open that up and get rid of the parts we don't want, and then we've got our chain that we want. For all the base of my paints, I will be using Flood Floetrol, and I like to mix them in canning jars so I can use them again if I don't use them all, and I can also write on top of what I've added inside of the jar. For my white, I'm going to be using Artist's Loft Flow Acrylic, and I've got a little bit of water here to thin the paint. And you give that a good stir, and right now there's the consistency. It's still on the thick side, so I'm gonna add a little bit of water, mix that in, and just add a little bit of water at a time until you've got the right consistency. All right, let's see what we've got now. Let's see if it's running off my stir stick. There we go. That's what I want, and I'm just gonna put the lid on this so it doesn't dry out while I prepare everything else. And the stir stick, of course, was for our mixing of our paint. I've got one just cheap brush from the dollar store that I'm gonna use to paint on my base coat on my canvas. Some cups, four cups, plastic cups to sit my canvas on while I'm painting my background. Paper towels will be for washing off our chain so we don't get it polluted with the black and our white. And then, of course, the water is for dipping our chain in to clean off our chain so we can do our next pull. This was just a trial painting I did a while back and I don't care for it, so I'm going to cover this in black paint. Now I'm going to add a little bit of Floetrol to the cup here, just a little bit, and then you can either choose to use a very concentrated paint. This is an Opus and it's lamp black and it's very concentrated and it is a fluid acrylic. If you choose to use a cheaper crafter's acrylic, which is fine, I've used this a lot, then you'll probably just have to use a lot more of this to get the black that you want. So I'm just going to go ahead and put a bit of Floetrol in the bottom of this cup. I'm trying to judge that I'll have enough to cover this whole surface here. And I'm going to use the Opus Fluid Acrylic. Let's just start with one amount. I'm going to mix this up and just see the color that I've got. In fact, I think I'm going to go a little bit blacker. So, I can't really tell you the proportions of how much Floetrol to how much paint. Basically, I say, just put it in until you're happy with the color. And I can just put some on here and I can get an idea of what we're looking at. So I'm actually finding this is actually quite thin. I want it to a little bit thicker than this. So not to confuse you, I'm going to come in with the Cheap Crafters Black and I'm just going to put about a tablespoon of that in there as well. And I'll probably thicken it up just a little bit. I'm going to be using a few more colors in the painting. I'm going to put in some leaves. I'm going to use Leaf Green from DecoArt, which is Cheap Crafters Acrylic from the dollar store. Thistle Blossom. And from FolkArt, it's Lemon Custard, but any yellow will do. Good thing to shake up your paint before because it does settle. And I'm just going to use a cheap dollar store palette and add some of the Leaf Green so I can dip my chain into there. And these ones here will just be a little tiny bit of a dab of paint to pull through on the flowers. So I'll just put a little bit in each of these. I'm noticing that that yellow is really thick. So I'm just going to add a little bit of water to that. So let's flood the canvas now with our black paint. I'll just pour it right onto the canvas here. And we want it thick so we don't have any background showing, but not so thick that you can't pull through it. I'm actually going to get my sides on here. Okay, so now I'm just going to flood the top here. I don't see the point in letting it drip off the sides so you're wasting paint. I don't want to waste the paint. I don't think that's necessary. And I probably won't take my design right up to the very top. So as long as this is nice and thick in the middle. I'll just even out the thickness here. And now that I've painted my sides, I'm just going to remove my cups because I want a nice stable surface to do the pulling on. So I'm going to start with the beaded chain that I bought from the hardware store by the foot. And I've got about three feet here. So let's just dip it right into our white. And I'm going to use one of my stir sticks to put it to the side of the jar and just let it pull off the side and pull off the stick to remove some of the paint. I'm going to come into the end here. There's the end. I'm going to use the stick to steady the end of my chain so it's not wiggling all over the place. So let's start up at the top here and we'll do one circle. And I'm going to do this upside down for you because then you can see how we're laying the chain. If we do it the other way, you won't be able to see it. And I don't have quite enough chain here. So I'm going to just hold onto it and I'm going to come in with my sticks. I'm going to add a little bit of pink and yellow. Okay. Now, because I have a short strand, I should have really cut four feet of this. I've got to estimate that I'm coming straight down. So once I get down to the bottom here, I'm going to use my fingers to pull straight through. And there's our first flower. Now, I find it easier to go to the sink to wash this off. I know it takes a bit of time, so I'm probably going to just pause the video and then we'll come back and we'll do another one for you. Once I've got my chain washed off, I just grab a towel and just dry it off on a towel. So this is one that I got from the dollar store and this was one of the necklaces. And I'm going to make a leaf now and come off this flower and make a leaf. So we'll do that next. Here's my green paint. Mix it in. And then again, when I pull it out, I'm just going to use my stick here to catch it along the side to take off any excess paint that I don't want. Let's drop it about here and steady it. And then I'll come through that glob that I didn't really mean to make and then bring it down to the base of the flower. And I want to come in and I'm going to add a little bit of my white here and there. And again, I'm going to hold it with my fingers and I'm going to pull it through. And there's my leaf. I'm going to do another leaf on the other side. I'm not going to worry too much about the contamination because I don't have a lot of paint. So I'm going to go right back in and this will just make a little bit of a darker color because it does have some black in here. And then we'll pull it out and we'll come up about here, bring it down so it forms an arc. Bring it back down. And let's come in and add a little bit of white. No two leaves are going to be exactly the same, are they? Again, we'll hold it with our fingers here so it comes down to the base of our flower and we'll pull that through. There we go. That's the leaf I wanted. And now here's the bigger chain I got from the Canadian Tire that was in three pieces and I've added the links together. So we've got three links together. So let's use that one this time. Come up about here. And this time we're going to make a little bit of a different pattern. So this time we're going to start here on the side. We're going to let it loop up, loop up, and then we'll come down. Again, I'm going to put in some pink. I'll put it right into the middle here. Two fingers. Let's pull that through. Now I'm going to use the vine necklace that we got from the dollar store. And let's try that one. Use your stick to steady it. And we'll do a little bit of a smaller flower this time. So we're going to go a little circle, a little loop, a bigger loop, loop, bigger loop, loop, and then a loop. And again, I don't have a lot of string on this one, so I'm going to really have to be careful and figure out how to pull this one. But I'll be, just hold on to that because I do want to put in some more pink because that's the theme for this particular painting. Just going to have to pretend I'm in the middle here and just bring her down. And then we can come down the rest of the way. You can see how much finer that one is with the finer chain. It's very delicate and very pretty. I'll bring it down a bit later to really show you, but I'll keep going for now. You see where I've actually done that little loop and it makes it look a little bit more like a double full flower whereas these ones are single. So let's come in and do another one. I'm going to use the same chain I used on this one. And instead of your chain, make your stick. And I'm going to go about here, I think, for this one. I'm going to start with a circle on the top and this time we're going to do the doubles. Again, using my stick to steady it, I want it to be placed right here. And I'm going to do two circles, one circle, another circle, and I'm going to let that come right down. I'm going to come in and pop some pink right into the middle of that. And I think I'm going to do a couple more in here and in here, just like some singles. But I think I'm going to make the circle just that little bit bigger this time. I think just to balance it, I'm going to come back in and do another really fine one like this one and we'll pop it in over here somewhere or maybe over here. So I'm using the fine necklace again. Now I want a little fine one up here, but I don't want to disturb this flower so I'm going to stop it just before I get to here. So I've just got it, so it looks like it's coming behind. I'm trying to do the leftover pink here and start right here and just do a little bit of a drag to make it look like this one is coming all the way through. I'm going to just twist down a little tiny bit down to here and this is where I'm going to pull right from here. Now in hindsight, of course, it would have been a good idea to do these in the background first because I really like that look in the background because it looks like it's darker and it's further away. But I didn't think about it until now. I'll grab some of that paint still and just drag it right up to the top of that one flower there. And then I'll bring it down to the bottom of the flower, grab another one. Oh, whoopsie daisies, that's not good. So I'm not really digging this flower too much. I'm going to try to come in and do a double pull on this one and just see what happens. Hopefully I don't totally ruin it. That gave it a little bit more dimension at least, but it did pull out the black more, which is okay. All right, I think we're ready to put in some more greenery on the bottom here. So again, I'm going to use that nice big chain I got from the dollar store that was the necklace and we'll just pop it into our green here. So I didn't like what happened here. So I'm actually going to just take that chain and come right back in again and do a second pull. Still didn't do what I wanted it to do. That's okay. That's what this art is all about. You never know what you're going to get. But I can fix that because later I can come in and do another flower right on top of that. So we're going to be just fine. And after all this experimenting, my favorite chain is the chain I got from the lumber store that I got cut in a three foot length. So that's my favorite one out of all of these chains. So I'm going to add a little bit more leaf to some areas here. I'll come back in this leaf here and see if I can just get a little bit more definition. That's what I wanted. I'll try that. Now that I've got some more black on here, I'm going to come back in this one and fix this one as well. Now I'm just going to finish off and just where there are a few areas I'm not that happy with where the yellow paint came in here. I'm just going to add another little flower in here and maybe another one in here just to finish it off. So back with my regular chain here. And one smaller one right between these two. And then I think I should stop because I think I'm going to be overdoing this. Okay, I said I was going to stop but I can't stop. Why is that? I'm going to, I want to pull it off to the side here. I said I was going to stop. I just keep going and going here. I just feel like now I need one ear. Oh boy. Okay, so I'm going to do one more with a little double top on it. All right, so now I'm going to give you the final reveal. Right side up. Sorry I did that all upside down for you but it just was a lot easier so you could see what I was doing. So there you go. Right side up. We've got a garden of flowers and I like how I've got the bigger flowers and then the darker flowers in the background. Then we've got the leaves and then we've got the white little flowers in the front and give you a little bit of dimension. And so here's some close-ups for you. This one was done with the necklace from the dollar store. The really fine chain. And this one in the middle. You can see there's a little bit of lacing happening which is kind of cool. And this was done with the regular size beaded chain.