Silk Painting!

Hi all :)
Saw this thread and thought hey, I'd put up some of my works.
A friend taught me silk painting a few years ago (watercolour paints/dyes on a sheet of white silk) so unsurprisingly I've made a few for gifts and such over the last few years (may even be starting a side business making them so that I can partially escape soul-crushing IT tech support work).

What do people think?
Disclaimer: Some of them are from when I was pretty new, so quality, both of the painting & the photography, varies wildly.

Spoiler

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http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b2...ps1a0c203b.jpg

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b2...pseb3c2ee0.jpg

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b2...ps9b39a72b.jpg

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b2...ps5523af26.jpg

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b2...ps0fa10dd1.jpg

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b2...psd29bc837.jpg

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b2...see9b5119.jpeg

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b2...ps6ed92200.jpg

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b2...ps1023bdff.jpg

Well done, I really like the 3rd one. My wife does some acrylic painting on canvas, but watercolor on silk seems like something she might be interested in as well. Any tips for switching?

Well, honestly I know very little about any other painting medium so while I can answer questions about silk painting, I can't really compare it to others.

I guess the main differences would be that you have to tension the sheet to be able to paint it (in my case using a trampoline looking affair with rubber bands and safety pins), and the dye 'runs' as you paint with it, it spreads out quite a bit so you can't really do brush stroke textures, or go over painted bits with other paint to create depth, or anything like that.
Instead you use a black goop called "Gutta" to make a barrier that the dye won't pass, and then it's basically like paint by numbers, filling up each section that you've outlined. The 'stained glass' type effect is the easiest way to see this: Blocks of bordered colour, rather than being able to do shading or the like.

Wow, the first one looks really professional. The second one has an interesting picture - is this a protagonist from a book or such?

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Originally Posted by Themrys

Wow, the first one looks really professional. The second one has an interesting picture - is this a protagonist from a book or such?

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It didn't catch until I saw this post, but I think that might be Alanna from Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness books. Female knight plus red hair plus black cat with green eyes, and she's got the right coat-of-arms. Been a while since I thought about those... Is it your rendering of one of the actual covers? It looks like the sort of thing that might be, but I can't find one that matches.

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Originally Posted by Themrys

Wow, the first one looks really professional. The second one has an interesting picture - is this a protagonist from a book or such?

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I did that first one for a friend and her terminally ill mum, it had some special symbology for them.

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Originally Posted by Qwertystop

It didn't catch until I saw this post, but I think that might be Alanna from Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness books. Female knight plus red hair plus black cat with green eyes, and she's got the right coat-of-arms. Been a while since I thought about those... Is it your rendering of one of the actual covers? It looks like the sort of thing that might be, but I can't find one that matches.

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Yep, that's her :)
It's a modified version of the cover from "In the hands of the goddess", a friend 'upgraded' her from leather armour and a knife to the full plate, sword & shield.
You can't see it since it's one shot, but the sword, rondels on the armour and a couple of other bits are mixed with shimmer paints, so the colour actually changes depending on the angle. Eg, the sword goes from blue to silvery gold depending on the angle & light.

These look lovely!

When you use the gutta gloop, is it like inking lineart, or do you do it over a sketch layer, or work from tracery or what? Your angles and curves look too clean to be freehand with paints, especially if you can't erase. Can you erase? It sounds like a really interesting way to paint, though, thanks for opening my eyes to it!

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Originally Posted by Thanqol

These look lovely!

When you use the gutta gloop, is it like inking lineart, or do you do it over a sketch layer, or work from tracery or what? Your angles and curves look too clean to be freehand with paints, especially if you can't erase. Can you erase? It sounds like a really interesting way to paint, though, thanks for opening my eyes to it!

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The goop comes in a tube with a 'nozzle' end to it, kinda like a superglue tube with an opening about 1mm across.

I'll then have a black & white printout sitting underneath the silk which I can use as a guide, so it's basically tracing and then freehanding when you can't see the template properly and have to play it by ear. I'm sure people better than me at freehand art could freehand a line drawing with the gutta without much issue.

Then once you have those nice clean outlines, you can do the painting and the gutta keeps it separate.

You *can* 'erase' the gutta but it's not very precise. If you're super quick you can wipe it off with a damp cloth, but if you're not quick enough (as in, within 30 seconds) then you'll just get streaks of black. This works okay as long as it's in a relatively clear area, but if you stuff up something when there's no real room to wipe it.. not so good.

I've also discovered that Cold Power will wash away the gutta even when fully dried (my teacher was quite surprised by this, she's always told people that you can machine wash the paintings with no problems) so you can actually outline everything in black, do the whole piece, and then wash it in cold power and remove all the lines. It's an.. interesting effect.

The dyes though, once they're on there's no erasing or covering up, they're there to stay. The only exception is that you can usually put a 'gold' paint over a normal one, because the 'golds' (I'm writing it like that because some of them are more silver than gold, but they get called 'golds') are thicker and heavier than normal paint and will usually go over them.