Cling film and alcohol textures on digital paint
Easel by Zaweba offers cling film, alcohol drops, soap and decalcomania as wet-paint techniques, so you can make these textures on a PC for free.
Cling film and alcohol textures can both be made digitally in Easel by Zaweba, a free painting studio for Windows. Among its techniques are cling film, alcohol drops, soap and decalcomania, each of which creates its own texture in wet paint. Lay the paint first, apply the technique while it is still wet, and let it dry.
These are classic tricks from watercolour and acrylic painting. Cling film (plastic wrap) pressed into a wet wash and left until dry gives crinkled, crystal-like patterns. Drops of alcohol on wet paint push the pigment away and leave pale rings and cells. Soap changes how paint spreads. Decalcomania means pressing a sheet onto wet paint and lifting it, which leaves branching, fern-like shapes. All of them depend on wet paint and on timing.
Before you start
Choose a surface and a paint that stays wet long enough to work with. Watercolour on watercolour paper is the usual home for cling film and alcohol, and Easel's watercolour dries in about 20 to 30 seconds of real time. Acrylic dries fast and oil stays wet for around 10 minutes, so the window changes with the paint. The drying speed slider runs from 0.25 to 4 times if you need more or less time.
Making a cling film texture
Lay a strong wash, ideally of two or three colours that touch. Cling film texture is most interesting where colours meet, because the creases pull them together and apart.
Apply the cling film technique while the wash is wet. Leave it until the paint has dried; on paper the film is lifted only once the wash is dry, which is when the pattern is fixed.
Use it for things with crystal or crumpled character: ice, rock, water reflections, abstract backgrounds.
Making an alcohol texture
Lay a wash and use alcohol drops while it is wet. Each drop pushes pigment outward. Several drops close together make clusters of cells; a single drop makes one ring.
Alcohol texture sits well in skies, bubbles, galaxies and abstract work. It is also close in look to the cells you get in an acrylic pour, which Easel makes with its pour tool and silicone cells.
Keeping textures clean and readable
Keep some calm areas. Like salt, these textures are busy. They look best next to smooth washes, so plan where you want them.
Use masking. Masking tape, masking fluid and stencils keep areas clean while you texture the rest, and peeling them off leaves hard, clean edges.
Keep the canvas flat while the texture forms. A tilted wet wash runs downhill and can blur the pattern. Ctrl+0 lays the canvas flat.
Use undo to compare. Undo keeps 80 steps by default and includes drying, so you can try the same technique at different moments and keep the best.
Lock it with Dry now. Once the texture looks right, Dry now stops the wet paint moving.
Combining textures
These techniques can share a picture with salt, which leaves small pale speckles, and with blooms or backruns, the pale shapes with dark rims that form when clean water meets a half-dry wash. Mediums such as ox gall, gum arabic and granulation medium also change how a wash looks.
A single texture used with restraint usually reads better than every technique at once, so try them one by one first.
Saving the results
Save as .zeasel to keep the painting with paint, palette and masks as they are, or export PNG, JPEG or TIFF at 1x or 2x. These textures make good backgrounds, and a PNG can be sent on to Paint by Zaweba for further editing.
