paint party Friday paper and fabric

 

 Let's talk about paint, shall we? I did one watercolor on paper this week, but spent an amount of time painting on fabric instead. The above painting was done on a linen white fabric with textile paint.(they are acrylic with textile medium mixed in) 

I used to teach painting techniques on fabric, and have quite a number of different brand paints in my supplies, so I pulled out some that looked like my pink flower series, went outside

in the wild fire smoke (three blazing out of control fires at the moment in Colorado)(people still have firepits going in their yards here... eejits)

Working on fabric is a very different challenge than working with paper. The fibers wick the paint in often uncontrollable ways, and one must let it go... just enjoy the ride.

 I thoroughly wet my fabric first... a preference.  I painted three pieces during the two days. On the one above, I started by pouring seta color yellow on the fabric. I work on a plastic underlayment and was shocked at just how fast the paint dried while working with it. 

After the first pass, I tried sunprinting the heart with leaves from my garden

That didn't work at all... we have the sun and heat, but with 9% humidity they dried too quickly to migrate /imprint. Well any art quilter knows how threadwork and beading can change a textile so...

I went up to the studio, added in pencil and pen to shade a bit, then the next day I used overlays of color and stencils to make it more complicated. As a teacher told me once, "Excess is never enough"

One had stars so I put tiny gold stars on the big flower. I had one with blossoms, so I put those over the heart, in different paint colors, sometimes daubing one over another. Then I used this little stencil that puts paint in the negative space...

which left the flower image while adding depth around it... looks like embossing to me. Dab the end of the paintbrush in dark purple and make some dots... I love a dot...

see the subtle embossing look on petals?

white posca pen dots add another element, as will thread work later.

Many layers of paint later...

now the real work begins in studio... turning this textile into a piece of art. 

my one little paper painting was done to try metallic paints, and I did it on the back of another one I don't like much. 

to me it's absurdist, and not my usual but I like elements of it and will use them in other art I think.

I like the tree image on the top left. I like the weird change of scale from enormous leaves to the tiny snails made of triangles on the bottom. Snails or grains of sand, petroglyphs? 

So if you need me, I'll be in studio, avoiding the smoke outside, and trying to create.

Linking to

https://paintpartyfriday.blogspot.com/

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