The silk painting lesson

I was teaching silk painting today, and decided to snap some shots of the lesson. I had the kitchen table covered with newspaper before she came over, and a selection of dyes and a couple of shapes of silk scarves for her to chose from. We had a bit of a talk about how to wash the silk to prep it, and covered enough color theory to think about how the colors would blend together on the silk in the wet-on-wet technique we were going to use.

This is the initial color scheme she chose. For today, we used the Tinfix dyes from Dharma Trading Company.

I had her spritz the scarf with water to wet it down, handed her the sumi brush, and let her have at it. She had a ball!

The nice thing about this style of painting is that there really is no wrong way to do it. She experimented with painting with the brush, sprinkling dots of color from the eye dropper, adding water and letting the dye drip sideways...

...adding salt on the wet dye to pull it into organic shapes, layering colors on top of colors, and spritzing the dried scarf lightly with water to leave droplets.

After she got it where she wanted it, we sat around and watched the paint dry. Which sounds boring, but really was fun. Because as the dye dried, it still migrated on the silk and pulled into intricate shapes. The color also lightened into a lovey sherbet color as it dried.

She was delighted!

I'll steam this for her on Monday to set the dye, and wash and iron it hopefully on Wednesday evening after I'm done with work. Then I can send it off to her, so she can show it off to everyone. In the meantime, I sent her home with a Dharma catalog, in case she wants to do this again. I suspect she will, as she was pretty hooked and already planning her next scarf or three. What can I say...silk painting is addictive!