I am a 3D kinda girl, but I found silk painting very engaging. We used silk scraps to try out tracing first in pencil and then in gutta, a water-based resist designed for silk. We also tried out silk dyes. I went for an abstract design combined with a pallette that reminded me of Chagall. The speckled green pattern was created by sprinkling salt on the wet dye. This works with watercolour as well. I also tried layering the dye to blend colours and learned that if you don’t apply a thick enough line of gutta that the dye will bleed anyway.
Which orientation looks better?
For my “good copy” I chose this picture:
You can see that in some areas I didn’t apply the gutta thickly enough. It forced me to experiment to try and make the yellows and oranges that leaked into the water look like they were supposed to be there. And then the wet dyes would drive the first layer back and I had no idea how far they would go. Even yellow dye would push back darker colours.
I want to go to the aquarium and take a bunch of photos of jellyfish. Then I can practise reducing them to shapes like for a colouring book. Then either use silk dyes or watercolour to paint them.