Silk Painting - Class 3

If you're back for Class 3, you may be bitten by the silk painting bug!  There's just something a bit addictive about it.  Plus, you get to work with silk!

This week we'll be working with using a brush and getting used to mixing silk paint colors.  If you're new to this series, see Class 1 for the materials you'll need.  And everyone should review Class 2 as a reminder of the techniques we're using.


For this scarf, you'll need a prewashed scarf (air dried and ironed), clear gutta, and one of the following groups of your silk paint colors - either raspberry, hermes red, tangerine, and primary yellow OR hermes red, gitane blue, iris violet and turquoise OR gitane blue, turquoise, primary yellow and oriental green.

Stretch your scarf on the frame.  Using the clear gutta, draw lines horizontally and vertically on the scarf, dividing it up into small squares.  Don't worry about having wavy lines or squares that are different sizes.  They'll still look great!  Just concentrate on learning control of the applicator.

Pick one of your colors.  Using full strength paint, color in random squares all over your scarf.  To paint, let your brush soak up the paint, lay your brush onto the surface of the silk, and let the silk draw the paint out.  It'll probably move to the gutta and stop, but if it doesn't quite reach, touch your brush tip to the white area and let the paint be pulled out.

Continue with the other three colors - but don't fill the whole scarf up!  You're probably going to experience breaks in the gutta that cause one color to leak into the square next to it.  Don't worry about it for this project - just look at why it happened so you can work at getting the gutta on without breaks.  We'll look at this more next week.

Now, we'll start color mixing.  I use small plastic cups I get at a restaurant supply store - anything that doesn't soak up liquid will work.  Mix a small amount of two of the paints together and apply them to the scarf.  Continue doing this with different combinations of paint - move on to mixing three colors together.  

Let dry completely, wash to remove the gutta (see Class 2), air dry and iron.

I just love sunlight shining through silk!


Next week we'll be working on a scarf that uses a design we'll transfer onto the silk.  


Happy Creating!  Deborah