Monday, February 6, 2012

Shaded Florals

Last week I posted about the wonderful "marking" day I had with my Fiber Junkies group. One of my favorite markers is the Paintstik by Shiva.  It's oil paint in stick form and works great on fiber.  It's also permanent after allowing it to air dry for a week. I have a load of them, can't help adding more colors.
 I started using them for shading when working with commercial fabric for the piece below.
The sticks worked so well for shading, I decided to develop a workshop to demonstrate this technique.
 It's one of the workshops I'll be teaching at Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival this month.  Students will have a choice of several patterns, one being my old stand-by  - the Iris.  This flower lends itself to a lot of shading. This is the Iris done in commercial fabrics before shading and threadwork.
 I'll use several paintstiks in colors close to the fabric color.
 I also use the tiniest of tiny stencil brushes. This gives me the best control and enables me to get into small spaces.
 I also use lots of index cards as they are sturdier than regular paper for mixing the colors. That's a plus using these - you can mix any color and being oil, they don't dry out quickly on the card.
 I choose areas that need a little "personality" and very cautiously start applying the paint.  Better to go light and add more, you can't remove it too easily once it's on the fabric.
 You can see I've started the bud below.
 I also use decorative threadwork.
 And some of the shading on the flower.
 so this
 becomes this with just a little effort.
I also use a microwave dyed background for a lot I do, but I'll save that for another post.

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