silk painting: geckos!
Jan. 5th, 2005 03:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sevThis was the second piece I did this season (the first one was the splotches I gave to my mom), and it was also the most ambitious.
I will not be trying something like this again until I have had a bunch more practice. I'm actually reasonably satisfied with the results...but I also recognize that there were flaws, and I wanna do better.
Since this was for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bevsob, the first thing I did was sit down with the internet and look at a bunch of photographs of geckos. Then I made four drawings.
I decided I wanted each gecko to touch the previous one as well as one of the long edges of the silk, so the background would be broken up into pieces. This helps when painting the backgrounds -- it's easiest to work in sections, but if there's not a design element separating one section from another, it's hard to keep the edges of the paint wet enough to blend cleanly.
I traced three of the four drawings onto the silk twice, and one of them once, I think. They ended up head-to-tail and swirling back and forth across the silk. I'm pretty pleased. I also added ribbons zig-zagging across the silk crossing the line of geckos, because I wanted to add interest as well as further subdivide the background.
And then, came the painting. Blue ribbons, smoky lavender/berry background, green-blue-gold geckos.
Most annoying experience:
The paint leaked *around* the edges of the silk, so even when I drew the gutta lines all the way to the edge, my colors still leaked into one another. This was highly annoying. Not disastrous; it's not very noticeable and, well, it adds character!
I'm experimenting with techniques to avoid this without having to have a white edge around the scarf.
The colors all turned out paler than I'd expected, and the background segments, even divided as much as I'd done, were still kind of boring looking -- and they had blue stains on them where the ribbons had leaked. So I enthusiastically coated the blue ribbons with gutta to protect them, and then added an even smokier layer to every other background section (as deliniated by the ribbons) and salted them, leaving the remaining sections lighter & less textured.
You can see how some of the salt leaked out into the plain ground. Next time perhaps I'll rely on the paler wash to mute the salt effect and just try to get *less* salt there, not *no* salt. That'll be pretty, I think, and way easier.
All in all I'm pretty pleased. I think I've got a good chance of learning the skills I need -- how to mix colors to get what I want, how to avoid paint leaking around the edges, how to add fine details on dry ground (like what gave me the spots and stripes on the geckos...they're cute, but I'd like them to look good on purpose instead of accidentally! :) ), how to use metallics without either overwhelming the piece or having it all fall off when the piece is washed (there's way more gold in these pictures than there was on the final piece...I think I mixed dry pearl-ex pigment in with the paint instead of using the lumiere, and while the latter does mute down a bit, I think the former mutes down a *lot*). Once I've made progress on at least some of those things...I'm gonna try again. Maybe something other than geckos.
And, for the curious, this is what my dining room looks like when I'm painting:
I have a real live art space in the basement, but it's not really big enough to paint these five-foot lengths of silk in. So, the household has been putting up with quite a bit of chaos on the dining room table. It drives me a little crazy, but not as much as trying to do it in the basement would.
I will not be trying something like this again until I have had a bunch more practice. I'm actually reasonably satisfied with the results...but I also recognize that there were flaws, and I wanna do better.
Since this was for
bevsob, the first thing I did was sit down with the internet and look at a bunch of photographs of geckos. Then I made four drawings. I decided I wanted each gecko to touch the previous one as well as one of the long edges of the silk, so the background would be broken up into pieces. This helps when painting the backgrounds -- it's easiest to work in sections, but if there's not a design element separating one section from another, it's hard to keep the edges of the paint wet enough to blend cleanly.
I traced three of the four drawings onto the silk twice, and one of them once, I think. They ended up head-to-tail and swirling back and forth across the silk. I'm pretty pleased. I also added ribbons zig-zagging across the silk crossing the line of geckos, because I wanted to add interest as well as further subdivide the background.
And then, came the painting. Blue ribbons, smoky lavender/berry background, green-blue-gold geckos.
Most annoying experience:
The paint leaked *around* the edges of the silk, so even when I drew the gutta lines all the way to the edge, my colors still leaked into one another. This was highly annoying. Not disastrous; it's not very noticeable and, well, it adds character!
I'm experimenting with techniques to avoid this without having to have a white edge around the scarf.
The colors all turned out paler than I'd expected, and the background segments, even divided as much as I'd done, were still kind of boring looking -- and they had blue stains on them where the ribbons had leaked. So I enthusiastically coated the blue ribbons with gutta to protect them, and then added an even smokier layer to every other background section (as deliniated by the ribbons) and salted them, leaving the remaining sections lighter & less textured.
You can see how some of the salt leaked out into the plain ground. Next time perhaps I'll rely on the paler wash to mute the salt effect and just try to get *less* salt there, not *no* salt. That'll be pretty, I think, and way easier.
All in all I'm pretty pleased. I think I've got a good chance of learning the skills I need -- how to mix colors to get what I want, how to avoid paint leaking around the edges, how to add fine details on dry ground (like what gave me the spots and stripes on the geckos...they're cute, but I'd like them to look good on purpose instead of accidentally! :) ), how to use metallics without either overwhelming the piece or having it all fall off when the piece is washed (there's way more gold in these pictures than there was on the final piece...I think I mixed dry pearl-ex pigment in with the paint instead of using the lumiere, and while the latter does mute down a bit, I think the former mutes down a *lot*). Once I've made progress on at least some of those things...I'm gonna try again. Maybe something other than geckos.
And, for the curious, this is what my dining room looks like when I'm painting:
I have a real live art space in the basement, but it's not really big enough to paint these five-foot lengths of silk in. So, the household has been putting up with quite a bit of chaos on the dining room table. It drives me a little crazy, but not as much as trying to do it in the basement would.