One of the project the campers explored was creating a silk painting using a vase of flowers I had arranged in the studio.
This time I did the resist a little different, I had them use a small paintbrush rather than the narrow nozzled tubes. I thought it would challenge them to keep their lines loose.
Before starting, I put out what I like to call "magic paper", it is a grey paper that you can practice brush strokes with water but dries quickly so you can do the whole thing again on the same piece of paper. Warming up with this paper prior to beginning drawing on silk with resist on a paintbrush helped significantly for the campers to get the idea of the process.
The biggest challenge was not getting too much resist on the paintbrush. Young artist always have a hard time believing that the resist is going to continue to spread after the initial application on the silk. If too heavy handed, they will end up with nothing more than a white blob on the silk as all the lines converge.
The campers applied their resist at the end of day, so began adding the dyes at the beginning of the next day of camp. They were so excited and I challenged them to limit their palette to three colors. I also suggested their colors be in the primary color families so they would have the ability to mix additional colors.
So some chose pink as their red or purple as their blue, as long as they were in the primary color family they would be able to do some interesting mixing.
After learning a few blending techniques and getting comfortable with applying the dyes on silk with a scrap piece of silk I had set up, they began.
The results were beautiful.
11 year old
8 year old
11 year old
No comments:
Post a Comment