If you’re bored with your usual art, break out of the mold with silk painting. Silk painting is a beautiful and challenging art form in which you can create bold, personalized, and beautiful paintings on raw silk.
Materials you can expect to use in this class include raw silk cut to size for your project, a variety of dyes for the color, a resist substance, and brushes or sponges for manipulating the color. Once you master these materials, look forward to creating gorgeous wall hangings, framed silk art, unique scarves and wraps, and more.
Painting on silk is very different from traditional painting, which usually occurs on paper, wood, or pre-treated canvas. Because silk is a fabric, the fibers soak up the pigment quickly. To control the unwanted spread of color, you will learn to first apply a resist effective, often with hot wax or a similar substance called gutta. Resists can be applied via a squeeze bottle, brushes, or drippings, depending on the effect you want and the end product. Once these barriers are in place, use brushes or sponges to push the dye to the resist lines. The pigment will not seep past the barrier, so your designs will remain intact. When you complete the painting or reach a point you would like to stop and preserve, treating the silk painting with steam will help set the colors and make them even more vivid.
More advance instruction will focus on different effects that can be obtained while silk painting. By using different methods and techniques, you can create texture, pieces mimicking stained glass windows, color blending, and more. Use alcohol washes, salt, wet-on-wet dye painting, and more to achieve beautiful and unique looks for your silk painting masterpiece.