Need help please with strange problem with acrilic paint

[mhaze]

Hi

I'm trying to create some faux mable. I chopped up some fimo soft and fimo effect metallic clay and coated it with a mix of windsor and newton black and burnt umber artist acrylic paint. The paint refuses to dry and the underlying fimo becomes hard. I've tried two differnt makes of acylic and the same thing has happened. Can anyone shed any light on this? Can anyone give me a recipe that works?

Here's hoping

Mick

[ejralph]

Unfortunately this is because the clay formulations have now changed.

It seems the plasticizers in polymer clays and acrylic products are the same / similar. So they don't place nice together anymore.

Assuming you don't want to spend all of 2011 trying every brand of ink / paint to see if it is compatible, you really will need to find something different to create the "matrix" in the marble. Bizarre as it may sound, dirt works quite well!

You could also try dry pigment powders, charcoal - anything that will survive the baking process and not react badly with the clay.

The fimo waterbased varnish (http://www.ejrbeads.co.uk/shop/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=17_32) is the only acrylic product I know of now that will dry on unbaked polymer clays, as it has been designed to be compatible with the new formulation clays.

So you could try mixing different things into a little of the varnish to create the look you are trying to achieve.

If you are doing "knobbly" faux projects (for want of a better word) - for example faux turquoise etc where you create faux nuggets, you can simply push the chopped clay together losely to form your beads etc and bake them, then apply acrylic paint to the baked clay and it should dry fine. Then, when you sand back, you will leave the paint just in the recesses.

Hope that helps -

[mhaze]

Hi

Thanks for that I thought something like that may be the case. I've since discovered that some people make up the painted clay into bead shapes whilst the paint is wet and then bake.

Mick