Painted Out

[liralen]

I'm tired.

Spent the whole morning learning how to do silk painting and then trying to figure out a common vision of what it was we wanted to do. With six creators, it gets interesting trying to create something common but not too regulated.

The process involved mostly using acrylic paints for resist affects on the silk. Just painted, stamped, and dabbled on. Our common structure had some big, angled 'windows' painted onto it. They asked me to put the first strokes on each piece. The big, angled lines. It was scary to always be first on every silk, but so it was.

When all the detailed bits were put on, then we did a pretty structured painting job on top. Just deep blues at the bottom, shading to medium and light blues and teal. The light blue went up the sides and at the top, and then in the middle we used a fairly wild combination of red, green, purple, and apricot to just splash in color. Washed it with a pale blue wash to get it to bleed into the rest of the cloth, and then topped it off with salt. The salt leaves spots and the kosher salt leaves little comets. It's kind of cool.

The painting after the resist part is wild. There is no real way to 'control' where the color goes if you do 'too much'. It's like water colors on rice paper. Sploosh, woosh, and it's better to just reliquish control and let it Go. It's weird and stressful and also familiar for me, given that I try my test to control those affects when I do calligraphy or Chinese brush painting. You use those strokes to form the picture. It's odd to just give up completely on the control aspect and just try to get an overall Effect.

It was fun. It was a lot of work. And I'm feeling pretty empty now that it's done. Depressed a little. Tired, very.

There were five of us, and six banners to do and then we each got to do our own scarf. Mine was very regimented by that point because I was so tired... But so it is. What I am comes out. I like my neat bands of color that shade nicely between them, it was easy to do and easy to think of when I was tired. And I loved the colors. I liked the stenciled smiling, leaping frog and the rippled gold of a tiger. So it is. I should like me for what I am, but I couldn't help but envy the mad scarf that had red and teal in big swirls with enough green and red between to make a nice brown that calmed parts of it down, but then swirled into fractals along each of the bright parts. *sigh* I'll have to try that next time, I think. I loved how that worked.

I am not sure I liked how the banners turned out. Everyone else loves them, but I'm kind of bemused by that. They seem so... chaotic... so it is.

I signed all the banners with a tiny, smudged print of the Chinese character for 'courage' and that was good enough.