A TECHNIQUE DRIVEN Blog dedicated to mastery of surface design techniques. First we dye, overdye, paint, stitch, resist, tie, fold, silk screen, stamp, thermofax, batik, bejewel, stretch, shrink, sprinkle, Smooch, fuse, slice, dice, AND then we set it on fire using a variety of heat tools.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

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!


4 comments:

  1. I think the last one looks quite impressive. I like the reandomness of the black ink. Do you think if you just touched the points where the pins were that it would sort that problem?

    The dots are cool, too.
    Sandy in the UK

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  2. Sandy, I did try that, but it didn't work. The pin areas were actually paler than what you see in the photo before I re-applied the ink. Also, I was working wet-in-wet, so perhaps that's a reason why the ink ran...the edges of the silk were raised a tiny bit where they were pinned as the wet fabric slightly sagged.

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  3. Well, your watercolor experiment worked way better than mine! I love the dots. Can't wait to see what you do with the rest of the scarf.

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  4. Congratulations, you did an awesome work with this stuff

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