A Day of Painting

How is this for the background for a day of painting?  Right on the Erie Canal in western Upstate NY.

What a lovely day and nice group of ladies to play with!


I was able (to my surprise) to share some techniques that they hadn't used before which were pretty simple but were because of my long time ago experience with painting with acrylics on fabric.  I don't think I even have much on my blog about painting with acrylics and I have had the blog for ten years now!  So it was a re-introduction to me and also was a little tricky as I hadn't used the type of paints that I used yesterday.  All this was complicated by the fact that I had left most of my paints (I thought) down in NC.  I found  a bin full of paints though, a lot of which were dried out, they were so old.  They were full bodied paints or paint concentrates and acrylic extender.  Fortunately I still had some textile medium as well.  

This is Stephanie giving me a hard time but I caught her after she started laughing at her antics.  If you look closely at the piece she is working on, you will see a piece of polyester fleece underneath it.  This is perhaps my best contribution to painting on fabric with acrylics. I discovered I didn't like the kind of plastic-y feel that the fabric had when left to dry on a piece of plastic (how I was taught).  I tried putting another piece of fabric behind it but if it wasn't ironed, it left marks on the fabric above too.  So I finally settled on poly fleece -- no wrinkles and easily washed and wicks just enough of the paint away.  I especially used it when I was doing the dyed fabrics where I wanted the salt effects.  

This is one of Stephanie's fabrics where she painted with greatly diluted acrylics and then put sea salt on top and set it out to dry.  It will be even more gorgeous after she irons it.  It is amazing how ironing changes the look of these painted pieces.  I don't know which paints she was using as we had quite a variety to choose from.

I think this is one of Sue's but maybe wrong there.  She was using a lot of white on white fabrics and the effects on several were stunning.  It was tough to take pictures as the wind was blowing the pieces all over the lawn!

This is one of Janet's that I just loved!

A technique that I demonstrated was a monoprint technique using "fun foam", something many of the fusible things at Joanns are made from.  Basically the fun foam is glued to a piece of plexiglass and then you paint it and then use it as a stamp.  I learned this technique using dyes in a class with Ann Johnston.  We did a lot more mark making on the stamps in her class.  I was using full bodied Golden acrylics here which did not want to dissolve more in the water so it was a bit difficult.  I generally use the Golden Fluid acrylics when doing marbling and "water color" techniques with paints.  I have quite a large selection of these full bodied acrylics so will have to figure out something!!

The next three were done by applying the paints over a dampened piece of fabric (I used the cheapest of the Joann's cottons here as I had a whole bolt).  I then just randomly added colors in kind of stripes across the fabric.  Then I accordion folded it and added a pearlescent paint to the edge.  These were not as successful as pieces I have done in the past but are okay.

 Again I was using the full bodied acrylics and trying to water them down enough.  I also added a goodly amount of textile medium to each of the colors (I only used primaries except for one purple).  A few of the pieces of salt we were using obviously landed on some of these pieces as they were lying folded up on their edge.  That accounts for the whitish spots.

This was a piece that I had just painted and happened to take a picture of while it was sitting there.  After I got it home, I decided that it could use  a little salt treatment so I spread some sea salt on it and spritzed it with water hoping the colors would move a bit.  All of these six pieces were done with dampened fabric by the way.

This is what the piece looked like after it dried (overnight a part of the next day) and was ironed.  Think there was almost too much movement!!

The salt was applied here right after I painted it.

This was probably my favorite for the day.  I think these will all turn into cosmetic bags.  The surprising things were that the hand of the fabric was stiff but not intolerable and the backs were almost identical to the fronts which really surprised me.

This is a closeup of one of the stamps on the monoprinted piece.  I just globbed a paintbrush end to add the little bit of pattern on top of the monoprint.