Basic Acrylic Painting - Spattering Texture

Mary Gallagher Stout: Hi! I am Mary Gallagher Stout and today we are at the Lorton Workhouse. We are creating a very stony, very sleepy lion. In this segment, we are going to be spattering on some very diluted Paynes gray with a stiff brush. You can use a tooth brush or a stenciling brush, just something very stiff. What you are going to do is we are going to spatter, is the technique, and we are going to spatter it on all over our lion, our very sleepy lion. We are building up textures. So this is what we are going to be doing. You can just have so much fun with it. Let me show you how to do it. So you just take your stiff brush. This is a stencil brush that I am using. You want it to be pretty wet, not too wet. So just start spattering on the Paynes gray. You can really practice the direction that you want to shoot your paint in on another piece of paper, if you are uncomfortable with going right for it. But you should just go for it because we are doing a lion here and come on, we are ferocious, ferociously fun lion. So we are just going to build up all of this speckle texture. See, we have some big ones here that I am not really fond of. So I am just going to dab those out. See, and perfect.

We want it to be very irregular. If you have white spots, dark spots, little spatters, big spatters; the more irregular, the better. We are trying to make it look very gritty because stone is gritty. That's what we are trying to create, this stony, stony lion. This project is very easy and very fun. Little kids love it, so do adults. This is actually a technique that I use in my full finishing when I am doing a stone walls and such. Its really amazing, what just spattering will bring in terms of grittiness to a texture.

So the speckling is complete. I am going to blow dry it because I would like it to be a little darker, a little bit warmer in terms of darkness. The next glaze that we are going to put on is a darker glaze and its more gray. So what I am going to do is I am going to make it really gritty because I like my stone to be nitty-gritty. So I am going to put on, probably, two more layers of grit and wash. Blow drying them after each time to help build up the warmth. You can stop here, if you are wanting to go to the next step. I like to do two or three layers, like this. So we are finished with our speckling and we are getting ready to lay on our next coat, which is a light gray, which is a custom gray that we are going make ourselves. Its a very warm gray and I will show you how to do that next.