Planning for my silk painting attempt using watercolours

I'm waiting on some silk gutta and a frame to be delivered so I thought I'd try my honeycomb and bee out in watercolours to see how that would look. I tried to use similar techniques that I will be using in the silk painting experiments i.e salt to leech colour and using the paint on wet paper. I also used the lino cut of the bee, painted with watercolour to give a brief outline that I could work with.

I'm really pleased with the end result and I'm looking forward to trying this in silk painting.

Project 5 - Printing and Painting on fabric

As a repeatable pattern, I felt that the honeycomb would be easier to achieve - but only as a stepping stone to giving me the confidence and abilities to use more complicated images. However it was actually more challenging than I thought it would be.

I will be trying to fine tune the pattern today - turning it into a repeatable pattern, using a program very similar to Illustrator.

I spent Saturday afternoon carving a print of the honeybee from the original sketch. This was intended as a print cut to break up the honeycomb pattern in places. It printed very differently on paper using printer's ink, a much heavier and intense image, even when there was less ink on the block.

Using a very thin fabric with a satin sheen to it produced a much lighter print of the bee, giving it more texture. If you look at the black stripes, you can see a slightly 'hairy' effect which was not part of the block cut, unlike the cross hatching on the thorax. This was not evident on the paper print but seemed to be entirely a side effect of the fabric paint on the sheen.

Printing and Painting on fabric - fabric

I decided to take a break from the honeycomb pattern, turning again to my sketches of the horse's skull from our visit to Provost Skene's House in Aberdeen. I'm not sure why but the image has really stuck with me and I wanted to see if I could recreate it in lino cut and print.

I'm now using a speedy carve material for my printing. It's a lot easier to cut into although it is easier to make mistakes as well!

black ink on white paper

white fabric paint on black cotton

I am really pleased with how this has transferred onto the fabric. I like how it has changed from being a simple cross section of one of my sketches to a different object altogether. At one point I saw a caterpillar on a leaf and another time, I was thinking of a spine and muscle around the vertebrae. It isn't an image that seems to transfer as a repetitive image but I'm going to be experimenting with that tomorrow.