silk painting: dragon piece
Dec. 23rd, 2004 12:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sevstonewashed silk scarf. Plan: Wash of yellows & oranges. protect silhouettes with aqua gutta; overpaint with blue/black wash. Expected result: firey silhouettes against dark greenish background.
Traced dragon silhouettes onto back of silk with pencil -- would the pencil get "trapped" if I traced it onto the front and then did all that painting? Not sure I want to find out.
Stretched scarf & wetted it down.
The stonewashed silk doesn't wet down easily; the water beaded up on the surface. By the time all of it was wet it was *sopping*.
Mixed colors -- started with two bowls of golden yellow, two of sunshine yellow. Added a little of magenta to one of each of the yellows; added more to golden-yellow. Added drops of assorted lumiere to each bowl -- used gold & pearl on the plain yellows, and hot pink and bronze on the yellow-magentas.
Painted on a wash. The sunshine yellow got very pale and luminious, due to the very-wet ground and possibly to the addition of pearl lumiere.
Decided it was all kind of boring, so dropped on my rock salt -- first time using it. Those crystals are big, big, big.
Decided I couldn't see any of the lumiere effects anywhere, so spattered on some dry aztec gold pigment. Perhaps being sandwiched between two paints will keep it on the silk --
previous uses of dry pigment haven't stayed with the piece through washing.
Let dry overnight. This takes fer-fucking-ever to dry.
Remove salt; note that dry pigment stays stuck, that's good. The salt effect looks pretty, but the crystal-shapes are way more obvious than usual, both because they're big and because the contrast between pale yellow & bright orange is pretty pronounced.
The pencil drawing is now pretty obscured on the front-side, but still clear on the back-side.
The whole thing's pretty ugly right now, to my eye. The spatters of dry pigment are darkly bumpy. I figure that means there's at least a chance that there will be *some* of it left once this is done. :) The salt effect is pretty darn blotchy, but much of it will be overpainted and the aqua gutta might lift some of it where the overpainting isn't.
But some of it is interesting in the more local sense...
this shot is about two inches of silk. It's way too busy at that scale, but would be kind of neat at triple-size or so. But that would be *big* pieces of salt!
Heat-set, because aqua gutta over paint lifts some color, and I want to minimize that. (this suggests that the gutta may lift the dry pigment; that'll be interesting.
Next steps: Paint the silhouettes with gutta. Probably using squeeze-bottles for the finer details and paintbrushes for the big stuff. This should technically be done with wax, but I don't have the supplies for that right now. The texts I've read suggest that means that I won't get hard edges on my silhouettes. I think that's okay, though the hard-edged dry-brushstrokes from wax are pretty, pretty, pretty! One day I'll try that...
Traced dragon silhouettes onto back of silk with pencil -- would the pencil get "trapped" if I traced it onto the front and then did all that painting? Not sure I want to find out.
Stretched scarf & wetted it down.
The stonewashed silk doesn't wet down easily; the water beaded up on the surface. By the time all of it was wet it was *sopping*.
Mixed colors -- started with two bowls of golden yellow, two of sunshine yellow. Added a little of magenta to one of each of the yellows; added more to golden-yellow. Added drops of assorted lumiere to each bowl -- used gold & pearl on the plain yellows, and hot pink and bronze on the yellow-magentas.
Painted on a wash. The sunshine yellow got very pale and luminious, due to the very-wet ground and possibly to the addition of pearl lumiere.
Decided it was all kind of boring, so dropped on my rock salt -- first time using it. Those crystals are big, big, big.
Decided I couldn't see any of the lumiere effects anywhere, so spattered on some dry aztec gold pigment. Perhaps being sandwiched between two paints will keep it on the silk --
previous uses of dry pigment haven't stayed with the piece through washing.
Let dry overnight. This takes fer-fucking-ever to dry.
Remove salt; note that dry pigment stays stuck, that's good. The salt effect looks pretty, but the crystal-shapes are way more obvious than usual, both because they're big and because the contrast between pale yellow & bright orange is pretty pronounced.
The pencil drawing is now pretty obscured on the front-side, but still clear on the back-side.
The whole thing's pretty ugly right now, to my eye. The spatters of dry pigment are darkly bumpy. I figure that means there's at least a chance that there will be *some* of it left once this is done. :) The salt effect is pretty darn blotchy, but much of it will be overpainted and the aqua gutta might lift some of it where the overpainting isn't.
But some of it is interesting in the more local sense...
this shot is about two inches of silk. It's way too busy at that scale, but would be kind of neat at triple-size or so. But that would be *big* pieces of salt!
Heat-set, because aqua gutta over paint lifts some color, and I want to minimize that. (this suggests that the gutta may lift the dry pigment; that'll be interesting.
Next steps: Paint the silhouettes with gutta. Probably using squeeze-bottles for the finer details and paintbrushes for the big stuff. This should technically be done with wax, but I don't have the supplies for that right now. The texts I've read suggest that means that I won't get hard edges on my silhouettes. I think that's okay, though the hard-edged dry-brushstrokes from wax are pretty, pretty, pretty! One day I'll try that...