A Hurricane Flip Cup

I’m sure this is true for many of you out there as well, but sometimes I just like to pour without any specific image in mind. No expectations, no vision of the future, just a cup full of colors I like and a blank canvas on a free afternoon. This little flip cup was a result of one of those afternoons when I decided to take a break from my collage.

Supplies I Used:

• Artist’s Loft in white and violet
• Americana acrylic paint in ultramarine blue
• Canvas
• Elmer’s glue
• Water
• Rubbing alcohol
• Plastic cups and straws

I had a couple of colors that I like, and some time on my hands so I decided to get these hands of mine a little dirty. Two of my blues were pretty similar in hue, but one had sparkle and the other was a simple matte color. I also love purple and was happy to find that my blues went so well with the purple tube I’ve been working on for what feels like years. I also wanted a neutral color to go along with this one so I flipped a coin between black and white, knowing that they would both yield very different paintings.

I won’t lie, I was pretty happy when the coin landed on heads for white. I thought these rich dark colors would be cool with black as the neutral but it could have all been one note as well. I decided it had been the longest since I’d tried a flip cup so that’s what I went for this time. When I was layering my cup I was worried that I wouldn’t have enough white to come through and it would only pop out as tiny little cells.

• 

• 

When I lifted the cup I had a big blue blob with a few streaks of purple and almost no white. Uh-oh, my fears were looking more and more like a reality. But as it came time to tilt I was pleasantly proven wrong! The white came through loud and proud and kicked up a huge storm on my canvas.

It reminded me of one of those aerial views of an incoming hurricane or tropical storm! The white was totally doing the job, creating cells and lines all over the place. And even where the colors did start to go a little muddy it was creating beautiful light lilac and baby blue colors. It all felt very chaotic and natural like a big storm, and I was totally caught up in it.

Sometimes in art you need a bit of a palate cleanse, be that going back to the basics or just starting over altogether. For me, this was exactly what I needed to start moving forward on my future projects!