What I like about painting on acrylic glass

I have done a couple of pieces on acrylic glass by now, all of them abstract and most of them in a pointillist style. There is something really cool about this technique and that's what I want to talk about here. First of all, if the sunlight shines through these plates they really light up with colors and that's a totally cool effect. But there is another aspect of these pieces that I find intriguing. Because I typically put paint on in several layers (even for the pointillist stuff) the painting looks different depending on whether you look at it from one side or from the other, which you can do because the support is transparent. So you really get not one, but two pieces. And even better, if you let light shine through the piece you again get two different pieces depending on what side is up. And the whole effect can be even more interesting when you paint the acrylic sheet on both sides and don't paint parts of the glass. Now imagine a really thick plate, or (goodness) two plates mounted a few inches behind each other (Victor Vasarely experimented with something like that too, I know) the painting changes again depending on the viewing angle. Very very cool stuff.

Here you see on of my pieces on acrylic glass. It is painted on only one side of the glass and still you get very different results depending on whether you look at it in reflective light or if light is shining through it.

I plan to experiment more with this. Among the things I want to try is to use a really thick plate (I have a 1 inch plate here for that purpose but am saving it till I know exactly what I want to do as the material is a bit pricey).

By the way: For the early pieces I used heavy body acrylics, so you get a bit of a 3dimensional structure as well. On the newer pieces I'm using fluid acrylics. I also experimented with flow medium and then manipulating the wet paint by blowing on it or using a can of compressed air. I noticed that the acrylics with flow medium stay tacky forever on the acrylic glass (maybe I used too much?) So they attracted fingerprints and dust. Not good. In any case, the acrylic paint seems to stay too soft even after a long drying time. I use Krylon UV resistant Acrylic coating (glossy) on the plates once they are dry and that gives them a harder and more solid surface and protects the paint film against scratches.

Below are a few more examples:





Now if anybody could tell me how to keep those images from being aligned like a staircase I'd very much appreciate it...