Colour Pencil on Fabric

Earlier, I showed how I had begun colouring in my design which I transferred to fabric. Here is the result.

To achieve that blended multicoured look, I used 3 pencils. Working in small sections I added a bit of the blue

then some green

followed by the yellow. 

Once all 3 colours were applied, I simply continued to build the layers until the desired intensity was achieved.  As the sections were completed, I lightly brushed textile medium over the pencil to seal the colour. I tried a few different brands and found that for this project, the one I liked best was  Folk Art Textile Medium made by Plaid.

Even though this is not the sort of technique that would be used for a project that would be washed regularly, I was curious to see if it could hold up to a gentle wash. On a scrap of the same fabric, I drew and coloured with the same supplies. I cut the pieces in half, marked "wash" on the bits that would be tested.  Submerged into cool, soapy water, agitated a bit, a short soak, then rinsed.

 I placed the bits side by side once dry and as you can see, the colour remained vibrant.

Wash test

 My last post about using paints and inks on fabric along with various "extenders" led to many of you asking if the painted/inked fabric can be washed. The short answer is that once heat set, these products are supposed to be permanent.......but, of course, I had to test this. I took the sample that I showed in that post and sliced a couple of strips off, enough to be able to wash (by hand, in warm soapy water) I made a couple of notes so that I could easily line it all back up again, I did it this way so that I could now compare the washed pieces to the originally painted/inked fabric.

Looks good to me!

 There was no bleeding and it appears that there was no colour loss or fading either. Generally, we are not going to wash a painted quilt but, it is nice to know that if it did get wet, it won't be ruined.

Mediums, Gels and Extenders .....oh my!

If you stop by here occasionally, then you know that I very much enjoy experimenting with paints as well as inks. Most of the time the paints/inks are not used straight from the bottle, they have to be mixed with something to help them flow across the fabric easier. I decided to make myself a little sample piece as reference to see what happens to the fabric when each of these products are added to paint and then applied to fabric. Here is what I did. I took 2 pallets, one for SetaColor transparent paint and the other for FW acrylic inks.(also transparent) I have a number of gels, mediums,and extenders....each with its own viscosity.

On each pallet, I mixed my colour (paint or ink) with roughly equal amounts of each of the products you see in the photo.
On fabric, I drew decent sized circles and labeled them. One row is the SetaColor paint mixture and the other is the inks. The first circle in each row is the paint or ink straight from the bottle, so you can see the true colour. I used colours that looked  fairly close to each other......Vermillon in the paint and Scarlet in the ink. The colour intensity will depend on the ratio you use when mixing the paints or inks with the mediums.

The hand of the fabric changes very little with any of these products, you may notice a different "feel" if you pass your hand across the painted surface, but the fabric itself is still very pliable and easily stitched.
In case you can not read the labels in the photo.....I used....Clear Aloe Vera gel (find it at the drugstore....has to be the clear stuff) there is an acrylic glazing liquid by Golden, a Floating Medium by Folk Art, Colourless Extender by Jacquard and Lightening Medium by Pebeo.

I seem to have fallen behind in The Creative Prompt Project once again.....the current  word was Present, my response is this quick paper cut.

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.