• About
  • The Colors of Snow

Dancing Bird Studio

~ Art and Nature in Wisconsin

Dancing Bird Studio

Tag Archives: silk painting

More of the Cranes

24 Sunday Jan 2010

Posted by Darcy in Art, Nature

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Cranes of the World, hand dyed, hand printed, International Crane Foundation, silk painting

Here’s the scarf after the cranes have been hand colored with thickened dyes and steam set. Since white is a prevalent color on a variety of species, I’ve used very diluted grays to shade areas that might be difficult to see on this photo:

15 Cranes hand colored

15 cranes hand colored

The next step for this particular scarf is to paint a background. I am leaning toward a very light blue – my perception of sky blue – to complete this project. Coloring in each bird took a bit longer than I expected. Future versions will probably be modified to make them more affordable for people and easier for me to produce.

You can click on this image to see a larger version.

Hoar Frost and Crane Scarves

18 Monday Jan 2010

Posted by Darcy in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Cranes of the World, Dancing Bird Studio, silk painting, silkscreen

Everything was frosted this morning from the fog that developed last night. Hoar Frost develops on surfaces by direct condensation at below freezing temperatures. The crystals form little needle shaped structures giving trees and shrubs – or anything outside – a feathery and delicate appearance. This pic of my studio is take from the back deck of my home, past the icicles hanging from the roof.


Tonight’s forecast calls for even heavier fog, which should mean another surreal winter landscape tomorrow. I’ll head back to the studio to continue work on several projects including a scarf I’ve been planning for a long time. These silk scarves will picture all 15 of the world’s cranes. The version I’m working on currently shows each crane printed in black and hand colored with thickened dyes. Tomorrow I will steam set what I’ve done so far and then decide what to do on the background. Here are some photos of the process.

blue crane

The Blue Crane was the first species printed on the scarf

15 cranes

A drawing of each crane was placed on the scarf so I could position my silk screens correctly.

15 cranes

Here is a square silk scarf with all 15 species printed

Tomorrow I’ll post the results of the hand colored birds after they’ve been permanently set on the silk.

The Case for Multiples

15 Tuesday Dec 2009

Posted by Darcy in Art, Nature, wildlife

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

green heron, screen printing, silk painting

Many of the pieces I do include a variety of techniques. I started my career with textiles using the process of silk painting. My first class focused on a technique called gutta serti, which uses a resist to paint an outline of a design onto a piece of silk stretched on a frame. Then dyes are applied to the silk, much like watercolors to paper. I was intrigued with the intense color and fairly quick results. But the gutta left a white line – similar to the black line of a coloring book. I often felt this detracted from the overall design and decided to find ways to eliminate that element.
Green herons printed onto silkOne way I achieve that is to screen print a basic outline of an image onto white silk and hand color it with thickened dyes. Here I have a series of Green Herons, a wading bird found in this area. The birds were printed with thickened H series fiber-reactive dyes and then steam set so the outline will stay crisp during the application of the dyes to fill in the colors.

green heron with color appliedHere is one of the birds colored in, also with thickened H series fiber-reactive dyes.

green herons after steamingAnd here is the entire piece of silk with all of the herons hand colored and steam set. Eventually, these birds will be cut out of the surrounding silk and appliquéd to another piece, so the bleeding of the colors into the background aren’t an issue. If I’d wanted to keep everything as one piece, I would have masked the background and made the colors a little thinner during application.

As you can see if you look at the large version of the last picture, each heron looks quite different from all the others. This will allow me to choose the one I like best for each piece. Below are closeups of a few of them so you can see just how different they are from one another.
green herongreen herongreen heron

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Dancing Bird Studio
    • Join 74 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Dancing Bird Studio
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...
 

You must be logged in to post a comment.