Silk Painting Workshop Creations

11 year old

Last Wednesday and Thursday, I ran a two day workshop in the studio focused on silk painting. I love this medium and I love watching children discover the wonders of putting dye on silk too. The results are always interesting and beautiful.

This time, I applied the students work to canvas once finished. I really could of used an extra hour with this project but it all got done in the end.  If I do this workshop again (and I definitely will!), I would make it a bit longer instead of just two hours each day.

I had six girls in the class and each was able to choose their own subject matter. 

7 year old

They created their sketches separately and then when they were happy put them under the silk that was already mounted on frame. This took a bit of doctoring on my part, but by placing the sketch under the frame on a large book solved the problem of not pushing down to hard on the silk and destroying the mounting.

Once they were finished transferring their sketch onto the silk with a pencil, I gave each girl a hoop with a scrap of silk. This was a way for them to test and discover all the upcoming steps until confident enough to work on their final silk.

Fist I had them write their names on the hoop silk and draw pictures with the resist so they could get an idea on how much pressure to apply and just how much the resist would spread.

Then when they felt comfortable, they added all the resist to their final work.

10 year old

Then while the resist was drying on their final work, I pulled out the dyes for them to experiment with.  First I showed them how the dye would move, how to add water to the dye, salt, and how to blend colors by "scrambling". Afterwards, they played on their hoops with the dyes to get the hang of the medium.

Then once they were comfortable and the resist was dry, they began adding dye to their backgrounds.

7 year old

The above artist got completely lost in the process, which I LOVE, and spent a lot of time just dropping dye onto her silk with the dropper and watching it move. I had not planned on the students using the dropper to add dye directly on the silk, (they had them if they wanted to mix their own colors), but it was fun to see how they decided to use them.

7 year old

So were quite nervous at the beginning when placing the dye, would they do it wrong?  Would they make a mistake? Luckily I had made the frames much bigger than the final canvas, so they could work on the outside edges until they built up their confidence knowing in the end, it wouldn't show.

10 year old

I think they were all quite proud of themselves in the end, I know I was proud of them!  

Once finished, I had put some silk scarves mounted on freezer paper for them to create another artwork. This time, they did not use resist at all. 

One of the students was also in the morning camp I was doing through North Vancouver Community Arts Council and I could of not been more tickled to see her wearing her scarf throughout the last day of camp. I am so glad she was enjoying it and was just beaming when I told the other students that she had actually created her scarf by herself.

As you can see, there was A LOT of eye droppers being used on these scarves. They certainly got lost in the process of creating these and used every last bit of available time to finish them before pick up. I had originally thought they would be able to use a sharpie pen to go back in and create imagery from the shapes created by the dyes, but by the time we got them all set and off the freezer paper their mothers had arrived for pickup.

I sure hope the girls enjoyed the workshop as much as I did teaching it. Tomorrow morning starts the two day printmaking workshop. After that there is a one day workshop where each student will create one very large canvas. For more information and to sign up, go to KudzuStudio.com