Acrylic Inks on Fabric

I am guest blogging here again and this time I am sharing my latest experiments with acrylic inks.  The company that makes these has a website here that provides more information than I needed.  Which is a good thing.  They're like regular acrylic (textile) paints, except much thinner.  And I think they act like they have more pigment then the acrylics I usually use.

I was able to find them locally at my favorite art store.  First, I made a chart.  I played around with mixing them here and discovered that the "primary set" I purchased didn't make a good purple.  So back downtown I went where I purchased Prussian Blue and two (!) purples (Purple Lake and Velvet Violet).  I also couldn't resist one Pearlescent -- Mazuma Gold.

First I played around with diluting them with water and brushing them on dry fabric.  I added some salt (kosher) to the wet paint for fun.  These inks blend very nicely.  And it takes a lot of water to dilute the color.     

This was done with full strength inks dropped on a palette and brushed on with a small paintbrush.  Both of these were a little stiff after drying, but I let it cure overnight and ironed to set them and they softened right up.  Not as soft as the Tsukineko inks, but much softer than regular acrylic paints.  And the pearlescent was fine here in a thin coat --it's in the center of the flower, the nest under the bird and the center of the paisley shape.

 These inks have droppers in the caps.  I think this is wonderful!  Instead of pouring out the inks onto the palette and getting ink all over the side of the jar or pouring out too much and wasting it, you can drop it onto the palette.  And there's no need to dip a wet brush into the jar and pollute the whole jar!

So I wet a piece of white cotton and crumpled it, then spread it out onto a paper bag.  I dropped inks onto the fabric and let them spread.

The only thing I didn't like about this was that the Pearlescent Gold cracked and peeled off after heat setting.  In their defense, the company says that the Pearlescents aren't designed to withstand high temps or washing.

I don't usually like pearlescent paints anyway, but I just could not resist the gold.  It's been so dark and dreary....



This is the bag that was under the fabric when I dropped on the paints.

And these are the parrots.  I painted them on dry fabric with brushes.  I had no trouble getting fine detail with a tiny brush and undiluted inks.  I did have trouble with inks spreading all over when I diluted them.  The background on this piece is a couple of tablespoons of water with two or three drops each of black and Velvet Violet.  The Velvet Violet isn't categorized as a pearlescent, but it does have some sparkle.  There is not much ink in the water, but it turned out very dark. And I had a lot of trouble with bleeding -- so I learned to keep the brush far away from my painted birds and wait for the ink to quit spreading.  I really like the mottled effect I got in the background.