"Dark Cloud" PYO Dragon – SOLD

Hi Sarah!!

I’m so happy that you’re painting your very first PYO – they are SO much fun to paint!!

I use Liquitex Basics acrylics – they come in decent sized tubes for a good price. I usually mix my own colors so I only need to get white, black, red, blue, and yellow. It makes matching colors a bit harder, but I am so used to it at this point that I wouldn’t switch!

I sometimes add some interference straight into DARK paints – if a paint is too light, it wont show any of the sparkle and shine so I dont recommend adding it to anything terribly light, but the darker the paint the brighter and prettier that sparkle will look! I also topped the piece you see above with auto paint called “Clear Effex” – its a topcoat that has a beautiful sparkle in certain light, and appears invisible in others.

As far as blending goes, my secret is no secret – its simply to make sure you use lots of thin layers of paint! With each layer you will achieve a deeper and richer coat of paint. Let it dry completely before you try blending on top of it! I also do a thing called “wet blending” – this means that my palette consists of only a few colors – for this fellow I had light blue, medium blue, dark blue, and chocolate brown mixed. In order to get the pretty blending, I would take the solid colors, lay them on the area of the piece that I wanted to blend, then with a TINY bit of one of the colors on my brush (since a totally clean brush has the tendency to rub off the paint and not blend), I would blend them together on the piece itself. Again, this technique along with the many layers will achieve a beautiful, rich effect.

Let me know if I can help any more, or if you’re confused by anything I said! I cant wait to see your PYO!!

I get my interference paint online but I have also gotten some at the local craft store – Michaels definitely will have gold and blue interference at their store if you have one near you. You can also get orange, red, green, and violet interference paints online (which is the main reason I get mine online now!)

As far as pearl or metallic paints – painting over a darker base coat will definitely bring the pearly colors to the forefront, but you can also try experimenting with mixing those colors with regular paints too, to see how it comes out! I often mix metallic paints in with my solid colors if I want a more solid reflection in my paints. It works pretty well! The only thing that I’ve noticed with metallics is that they tend to dry a lot faster than regular paints – even with retarder worked in, they become much more gel-like a lot faster than normal paints with retarder.

Oh, and retarder! I dont think I mentioned that, but it makes your paint last longer, and I use it all the time since I mix my own in small containers. It helps to keep the paint wet for longer.