Experimenting

A belated Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Here are a few experiments with the Tsukineko inks:

I was playing with a water color technique using a brush, just trying to see what the inks would do on this piece of poly/cotton sheeting (cut straight from the sheet and not washed).  It took the color well, but because I was working on a plastic background, I didn't get the blending that I wanted....lots of texture from drying it on the plastic, though.  Dried with a heat gun.  Want to do more of this sort of painting on cotton.

Just dubbing around with the Fantastix.  This is on cotton pfd.  I love the way the pens gave me so much control of the dots.   The pen with the blue ink had a split tip which allowed me to make the little 'tracks'.  This has possibilities!

This is the end of a silk habotai scarf, 10mm.  You can see where the silk pins held the fabric to the frame because the ink doesn't penetrate or flow nicely like dyes do.  I was using the inks to paint in the serti technique with gold gutta (fancy, but overwhelming).  The inks behaved a bit like silk paint or dye when I initially laid them on, blending quite nicely.  However, because the inks don't penetrate the fabric very well, so the other side looks like, well, the other side, somewhat dull and lackluster.  The black ink was disappointing as it lost most of its intensity when it dried.  I have 4/5 of this scarf left to experiment on, so stay tuned!