Creative Project: Macro Paint and Oil

If you’ve seen my reels, you might recognize the colorful liquid with floating bubbles at the beginning and end. That isn’t stock footage, I actually filmed it myself. At the start of the pandemic, I suddenly had a lot of free time and needed a creative outlet. So I bought a macro lens and started experimenting with close-up video and photography.

One of the things I started playing around with was mixing milk, paint, and oil. I was fascinated by the textures and the way the oil seperated from the milk. The results looked really cool, but it turned out to be a lot harder to film than I expected.

To get the shots in focus, I had to close down the aperture on the lens significantly, which meant I needed a lot of light to properly expose the image. The way it worked was I would mix paint with milk and pour it out onto a plate. Then I’d mix different colors into oil using small cups. I used a syringe to suck up the colored oil and place it carefully on the plate. Once everything was ready, I’d press record on the camera and add a single drop of dish soap.

For some scientific reason I don’t fully understand, the soap causes the liquids to react and pull away, which makes the entire surface move and animate. It’s a really unique visual effect. But because the lens was zoomed in so tight, everything had to line up perfectly in the frame to get a usable shot. I would repeat this process over and over for hours, trying to capture something great.

I really like some of the art I created with this technique. I even printed one of the photos on metal, and it’s now hanging above my couch. I also posted some of the footage to YouTube using stock music, thinking it might work as a slow-moving background people could put on at a party or while listening to music. Unfortunately, it didn’t get that many views.

Still, I think there’s something there. I have around ten hours of this footage, and I’ve been thinking about revisiting it and maybe posting it again.

Here are some of the photos. These are unedited.