Fabric Painting...........practice

I recently signed up for an on-line class, involving painting on fabric. I'll talk more about the class and the projects later, but for now I want to show you what I did this weekend. I watched the videos and while I wanted to dive right in to the project, I decided to do a couple of little sample bits first, to get the feel and to discover what products I liked best. I don't have the "floating" medium used by the instructor, so I wanted to test what I did have on hand.
I began by drawing a simple leaf, with paper backed fusible on the wrong side I cut these out and fused them to a background fabric.


All of the leaves would be painted using the same paints, but for each, these paints were mixed with a different medium. (Fabric sucks up paint very quickly, a medium is necessary, it gives you more time to work with the paint, move it easily and helps with the ability to blend the colours.)
This first leaf was painted using clear aloe-vera gel mixed into Seatacolor transparent paint. Isn't it amazing how just a little paint can transform fabric? I have played with, and talked about using Aloe Vera gel before, those posts are here


For the middle one I used a colourless extender made by Jacquard and the third was a mixture using an acrylic glazing liquid by Golden.


While this was not part of the class, I found that I learned a great deal from this simple exercise. In my next post, I'll tell you what some of those things were and show where I went from here.