Background Technique Using Rubbing Alcohol

This is such a fun background technique. But, I gotta be honest, it took me some tries to get it to work in some cases. But all art is practice, right?

• Rubbing alcohol

• High-flow acrylic paints or watered-down acrylics

• Card stock, art journal, etc.

So, the issue I ran into was that I wanted to use my regular craft paint, so I squirted some in a cup:

But I know it has to be a bit runny, so I added some water:

Now, you can do it that way, but it's difficult to find the perfect consistency. And the results weren't quite as awesome.

So, I'm going to show you how it went using the Golden High Flow Acrylics.

I squirted some paint on my card stock and filled my page:

Then you're gonna want to let that dry.

Once dry, give your paper a coat of a different high-flow acrylic color:

And now the fun part...

Dip a dowel or something similar into some rubbing alcohol:

Rubbing alcohol paint effects

And then splatter or tap the alcohol onto the wet paint of your second color:

Rubbing alcohol paint effects

Ooh Aah. Isn't that neat? Now, let that dry.

So, I had a set of Golden High Flow Paints. It only came with five colors, so that's what I was going to use.

I did not expect my next color to be quite so dark:

But it still looked cool as I did another layer:

And one more in a darkish magenta:

Final result:

I think it looks like a tortoiseshell, doesn't it?

Here are the others I made using watered-down craft paint:

So, you can still get some really cool-looking backgrounds even if you don't have high-flow paints.

Have fun!

And if you like that technique, check out my acrylic resist background technique.