Painting with clingfilm

I've been doing some painting in the last week, and because I heard it was a good method to get some nice effects, I've tried painting with clingfilm. I tried to find a good tutorial online, but the online things I could find (apart from some very stoned YouTube clips) were discussion boards on what-to-do-with-small-children-websites, where mums say that it is an easy and mess-free way to paint. Well, I must be doing something wrong here, because it is definitely not mess-free.
Anyway, I've discovered that there are basically three ways of painting with clingfilm, which will give you three very different effects. Because there is so little to find on the subject online, I'll add these three methods below, so hopefully someone else can benefit too. I don't have any pictures or a finished painting yet, but I hope you can follow me through these descriptions.

1) Take a big piece of clingfilm, at least the size of your canvas. Squirt some paint onto your canvas (one colour or several), scrunch up your clingfilm to get some texture, unscrunch it, put it on top of the paint, and start moving the paint around. You can create nice texture effects, ripples, and let the colours run into each other. When you are done (you can sort of see the effect through the clingfilm) leave it to dry for a looooong time (a day at least, because the paint does not dry very quickly under the clingfilm) before pulling it off. You can pull it off earlier, but then you run the risk of ruining your effect because you pull up paint that isn't dry yet. This way, you can cover the whole of your canvas in colours and textures.

2) Secondly, take a smaller piece of clingfilm, about the size of the area you want covered. Again first scrunch and unscrunch your clingfilm, and then paint directly on it the rough shape of what you want to have (using just one colour or more). Remember that this will be the mirror-image of what ends up on your painting. Then press it onto your canvas, again creating some texture with the clingfilm. You have less control over what happens here, because the paint will either reach the canvas or not, and if you flatten out all the ripples then you might as well have just painted a uniform layer on top. So the end result will be more of a surprise. Leave it to dry for at least an hour, and then pull the clingfilm off (your hands will still be covered in paint after this). This way, you do not paint an entire layer, but you can add some smaller areas of paint. Because of the texture in the clingfilm, you do not get a uniform layer, but in some areas the background colour will come through.

3) Lastly, take a piece of clingfilm that is the size of the area you want covered, which can be your entire canvas. Paint whatever you want to do onto another surface (preferably non-stick), put the scrunched clingfilm on top, press down hard, take it off, flatten it out, and then press it down upon your canvas. You can see the effect here, because you can see which areas will have paint on them an which are just see-through. You can leave it to dry, but you can also take this off quite quickly, because all the paint that was on the clingfilm should be transferred to your canvas anyway (again, you'll get a lot of paint on your hands). This way, you will not see all the paint that was on the original picture, but some scattered elements.

I personally prefer the second method, because I do not have enough patience for the first and the third method uses up a lot of paint that does not end up on your canvas but gets thrown away with the surface it was originally painted on. But it all depends on the effect you're going for!

Hopefully, I'll soon have a painting to show you!

ETA: 21 June 2012: I have now added a fish painting that I made using the second technique.