Now that they've all been distributed to their intended recipients, here's a photo of the three silks I've painted so far. Left: Kent's playsilk. Middle: Jack's mom's birthday silk. Right: My mom's birthday silk. (It's very convenient of our mothers to have planned their birthdays a week apart, eh?) I talked about Kent's before, and I ended up using different techniques on the other two. I used resist on Ann's to define the swirls, then went back the next day and filled in the pinks and greens. On Mom's, I wet the whole thing really well before I started, mixed some different dilutions of greens and blues, then painted diagonal stripes that I intentionally blended together. I kept the silk very wet the whole time, and at the end, I put a lot of salt on it to make the raindroppy-looking blobs. Salt pulls moisture in, including the wet paint, so when it's done and dry, it looks really cool.

So now you get an idea of the different things you can do with this medium. It's a bit like using watercolors — it's hard to do very exact, specific designs, but it can be surprisingly beautiful if you throw some paint on there and let it go to work.

Labels: craftiness, photography

• posted by erica 6/13/2008 09:51:00 AM
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