Choosing Paints for Acrylic Feather Painting

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village, my name is Carolyn Travisano, and I'm here to tell you about painting on feathers. So, as far as the paints I like using, the Apple Barrel and the Americana paints, they're an inexpensive paint, but they're a good decent paint. And as far as the feather you kind of need something a little bit thinner than say the basic latex acrylic. These are very thick, the pigment's excellent on this, but you have to work it and thin it out a lot and use mediums to stretch out the paint so the drying time is longer. So these, although they are great paints, they don't really work well for the feathers. And as far as the Apple Barrel and the Americana, they are a thinner paint and they hold the pigment very nicely. So they work well with the feathers. You'll be surprised at how inexpensive they are. So we use, for me I use a lot of earth tones, because I'm doing basically Native American, Southwest designs. So I keep them indigenous as far as the colors to the area. So I like lots and lots of earth tones. But in the end, when I'm putting for the portraits, I use a lot of Native American jewelry in it, lots of feathers and hair designs. So I'll go in with any type of basically dazzling colors, iridescent colors, gold, bronze, metallic greens, metallic golds, to bring out a lot more depth as far as the color. So this is, these are actually basically for the final stage because you want to put the details, as far as the jewelry and the color like that, in the final stages, so you're not reworking the paint constantly through the feather, because they are very delicate and you kind of shouldn't be handling them all that much, but I'll explain that later. And then basically at the final, final stage after you've signed your name on it and put in the final details, I use a Krylon matte finish over top of the feather. What's really interesting about the feather, because they are an oil base, the feather naturally has an oil base, that it will basically soak in anything that is an oil base, and anything that is an acrylic base or a plastic base basically will sit on top of the feather. And that's how we can paint on the feather, and why we can paint on the feather, because we're using an acrylic-base paint, actually sits on top of the feather, and the feather with the oil is resisting the paint. So it will sit and dry basically on top of the feather. Now, with using something like this, this will soak into anything that doesn't have paint on it, but will stick to any surface that does have paint. So, and I also use a matte finish because it brings out a lot of detail and it doesn't distract or take away from the detail of the design with the painting, with a gloss or anything like that. And also when you use a gloss it basically looks like you put a sticker on top of the feather rather than making it look like a piece of artwork painted on top of the feather. "