Silk Hibiscus

Silk Hibiscus

Image Size 8" x 10"

Silk dyes on silk

I'm going to be the demonstrator for the Tustin Art League on Wednesday and I will be showing how to paint on silk.  I will be showing the serti techique that uses a resist to control where the dyes go as well as the watercolor technique, which uses no resist and creates blurry colors. I also want show an example of how the dyes are controlled when using an all-over resist.  I have an all-over resist that is made by Jacquard called No Flow which I've used in small areas of other silk paintings that I've done but I've never coated the entire piece of silk and tried painting on it.

That is what I did with this painting.  The No Flow keeps the dyes from spreading and they act more like regular paints would on paper or canvas.  It was fun trying this technique but I missed being able to get the dyes to flow together and give that beautiful blended effect that can be achieved using the watercolor technique.

I also tried this same technique using spray starch as the resist.  It didn't seem to resist quite as well as the No Flow - the edges fuzzed a little bit - but it was almost as good.  I tried painting using the starch surface first and had okay results but I felt that there was something missing so I added some broken lines of black resist to create a look of pen and ink along with the color.  Here is that one:

I think I need to add some indications of other flowers and leaves loosely in the background.  I'm not crazy about this composition but I drew it in about 5 minutes so that's why it is as it is.  I learned that salt doesn't have much of an effect on this treated surface which makes sense because the salt can't draw the moisture out of the dyes like it can on an untreated piece of silk.

Overall, these two paintings were a fun experiment and I've added another technique that I can talk about during my demo.  Now, I just need to figure out what I'm going to paint that night.

If you are in the Orange County area and are interested in learning the basics of silk painting, you are welcome to come to the meeting.  It will be held in the board room of the Tustin Unified School District building at 300 south C street, Tustin.  The meeting starts at 7:00.