another silk scarf

i really do love to paint on silk.  the whole staying inside the lines thing that i get to violate to my heart’s content.  the brilliant colors, the way the whole thing is made out of light, rather than darkness, as with pigments on paper.

this is the composite scarf.  there’s a lot of white in it, but not for very long.  i did the usual outlining of all the flowers, and started painting on them with various greens and flower colors.  that’s going to be the easy part.  the difficult part will be the fairies.  i don’t want them too strong, but i dislike pastel colors, so it gave me a few fits before i figured out what i need to do.

sugar syrup.  karo syrup.  in a squeeze bottle.  it does interesting and strange things to dyes.

so i put sugar syrup around the fairies’ clothes and wings.  i’m leaving them under the fan all night to dry (hopefully, as it’s quite humid here), and then tomorrow i’m going to hit them with some fairly strong dark dye on top of the sugar syrup.  and when i hit them with water later on, they’ll do very interesting things.   the ephemeral touch i’m looking for on the fairies.

* * *

in other news, i’ve just started a test watercolor on a piece of clayboard, and it’s producing nice results.  more later.