Silk painting exploration

My first attempt at silk painting was on a French exchange, and I still prefer the method used there at that time - drawing with gutta on pongee silk and then filling in the spaces with silk paint or dye. I am attracted to this negative space way of thinking about an image, and also the flexibility it gives you. But the thing I like most particularly about it is the kind of luminous colour you can get this way.

I want to get better at doing it, though, and so last month I set myself some exercises to do that.

First, a couple of leaves that caught my eye:

While I liked them both, the one with the more
dramatic colour contrast and cleaner lines
appeals more for this project.

These leaves had fallen from a bush round the corner from
where I live. What appeals to me about them is
the unusual combination of colours,
and the way they show the plant's strategy
for surviving the winter -
withdraw everything useful that you can
from the leaf before letting it go.
The green parts still have chlorophyll,
the pink/tan parts have been drained of it along the veins. 

The beauty of death. A sketch starting to expore the leaf's visual properties.

This one shows that I had fun exploring it in various different ways -
this one using applique and embroidery.

I made some sketches to help me think about
composition, in the context of a square scarf.

And I tried out some colour combinations,
and texture marks.

This was a sampler I made to explore how to use silk paint, coloured gutta and sharpies
to create this pattern on a piece of silk 

I did another sampler, trying out the effect of dropping paint colours next to each other at various distances,
in spots and lines, to learn for myself how best to apply them for particular effects. 

This is the life-size outline I made for the
scarf, which lies underneath the stretched
silk to guide the gutta. 

 What I learned from doing this scarf:

- Silk paints are paler than they look when wet
- You can't change the gutta lines once they're on the silk
- I was excited, and started before I was completely sure which colours to put where.  Which led me to put them in the wrong places!
- Sharpies can make texture subtly or blatantly.
- The hole on the lid of the gutta bottle needs to be a bit smaller to make the line a bit finer.
...and most importantly,
ALWAYS GET THE COLOUR, TEXTURE, SHAPE AND COMPOSITION COMPLETELY SETTLED BEFORE BEGINNING!

The first scarf, still on the frame

Here is the scarf with adjusted colouring, with edges roll hemmed.
You can see that this one has the dark blue-green in the centre of the sections rather than pink
(IE reflecting the leaf more accurately), the texture is more subtle,
being made with different intensities of the same colour paint rather than with sharpies,
and the green is deeper and richer, which works better I think.