Hands on!

Meet the maker march continues with the topic of “Hands On”. Being a creative, a maker, an artist requires an ability to translate what is in the imagination into a physical result. Translating ideas of sketches into surface designs on silk takes time to get it together. Our hands have to be trained to follow the dream, the vision, the inspiration.

When you look at a hand painted silk scarf you may not realize all the work that goes into it. Here is how my hands create surface designs on silk. Silk painting begins with blank white silk, stretched on top of a sketch. Tubes of a substance called gutta resist are applied to create the design. I used a resist that comes in tubes with a fine point to them, and love the outcome. Here i am drawing the lines of the bicycle. Once this resist dries it seals into the silk, and will act like a dam to prevent paint from going beyond the line, just like a coloring book line does. Once the design is finished being applied with resist, and the resist is dry we move the silk to a frame, and begin applying the silk paint.

In this video, it was a different scarf, i was painting the roses. If you notice, when a drop of paint hits the silk it spreads out. The goal is to apply it to the center of the space and push it toward the edges without adding too much paint. Too much would cause the paint to flow beyond the resist lines.