Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Come Hither


My intent for this piece was to use the beautiful piece of patterned silk as a background as I did not want to cut it up. The silk has Alphonse Mucha-style ladies on it so I wanted to attempt a dimensional figure. The background behind the girl is silk that I hand painted using Color Hue silk dyes. Her body was painted onto prepared for dyeing fabric using my regular watercolor paints (for lack of anything better at the time), cut out and fused onto the painted silk. Her dress is silk velvet that I painted using Color Hue silk dyes. Her hair is dyed silk, cut into tiny strips, twisted and curled as I tacked them down. The trim around the edge is ruched silk ribbon.

Since it was the first "portrait"-type thing that I had painted onto fabric, I was fairly pleased with the results. Feet are so hard to do as well as hands. The next time, if there is one, I will use a finer weave of prepared for dyeing fabric. This one was too coarse and the paint collected on the little nubs of fabric. And, yes, it did bleed but I was using just a tiny bit of paint on a very small brush.

I felt that she had a "come hither" look to her eyes....

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