How to Use Fingers to Paint

Video Transcript

"Hello. I'm Matt Cail, and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to show you today how to do advanced painting techniques. Who says that finger painting has to end with preschool? Actually, and a lot of paintings including those with oils, and acrylics, artist still will occasionally use their digits to get certain painting effects on their canvas. Here, I've gotten some paint on the tips o my fingers here. Here's a nice advantage of fingers over brushes, you can basically load up two at a time, at least, or even five if you want to go crazy. Anyway, basically what you can do is you can tap in here and you can drag with the tips of your fingers. The tips of your fingers should give a little bit, being fleshy, so also they'll be very, very natural getting into some of these nooks and crannies. You can really push the paint around quite well by using your fingers. And you get very, very neat blending techniques. Again, this is just using your fingers, nothing more magical than that. Switch over to number two as soon as number one starts getting a little drier. You can come up with all sorts of various articulations here. But, as fun as finger painting can be, it of course is incredibly messy and, safety warning here folks. If you're using oil paints for any of this, make sure and extra, extra, extra, wash your hands when you're done with this. Oil paints are not to be ingested. They could be very, very dangerous if you do that. So make sure that you are getting all of the oil paints off of your fingertips, and especially out from underneath your fingernails where the paint can enter your bloodstream. I've heard of at least one man who was hospitalized, that's because he did not get all the oil paint out from underneath his fingertips. That's a little word of caution but hey, if soap's not a stranger to you or a pumice stone isn't, you'll be just fine about keeping clean. Occasionally being able to use the finger method for your paintings."