Creating an Angry, Volcanically Active Planet with Acrylics and Crackle Medium...

Hello and a Happy New Year everyone!  For those who celebrate, I hope you had a wonderful holiday season.

For today's post, I will show you how I made angry, geologically active alien planets using acrylic paints and crackle medium. These cards were so hard to photograph, and the pictures below have been manipulated a bit so you could (hopefully) see more details in the planet's surface.   I have to say, I am in LOVE with how this turned out!  You can watch the video on this too by scrolling to the bottom of this post.


To start, I used a circle stencil to lightly trace partial circles onto my cards.  You can use any circle shape or even free-hand it, but I used Donna Downey's "Bubble" stencil.

My next step was to paint in the partial circles with reds and orange fluid acrylics.  I didn't bother to mix or blend the colors, since I knew most of it would be covered up, but I wanted some variation in colors for those areas that did show through the crackles.


When the paint was dry, I loosely brushed crackle medium by FolkArt over the circles.  I didn't try to get an even coat, as I was hoping that by some areas having a thicker or thinner coat, I would get a different look.  I don't know if it worked because I had an uneven coat of crackle medium, but I do know that the final effect looked INCREDIBLE.

I allowed the crackle medium to air dry for a couple hours - I don't know if using a heat tool would mess up the crackle effect, but I didn't want to push it.  When the cards were dry again, I taped off my circle shape on the stencil and used it as a template for the next step with the black acrylic.  I dabbed a make-up sponge into heavy black acrylic (by Dina Wakley), and lightly pounced it onto the crackled circles.  Using only a light layer of the heavy paint was key, because I did not want the paint to settle into the crackles.







Oh my gosh, guys, look at that and tell me it doesn't look like volcanos and magma flowing on a rocky planet!  This turned out so much better than I hoped!

Once the paint dried, I painted in the rest of the card with watercolors - I even added a distant sun.  Now I had three, awesome alien planets...  I could have done better with the watercolors in creating the outer space look, but I am too in love with the planets to be bothered by it too much.  I will definitely use the crackle medium again in the future!


What do you think - isn't this an awesome effect?   Check out the video below if you're interested and feel free to leave a comment.  Thanks so much for stopping by - until next time!






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