Sadie’s Background iteration #3

For the last two days, I have been talking about building a background for the Saddle-Billed Stork Collage.

At this point, I was fed up with trying to use individual fabrics and decided to give painting a try!!

I had some Jacquard fabric paints but didn’t feel like I had the colors I would need, so I decided to make a run to Hobby Lobby and see what they had.

I was ecstatic to find that they had two packs of Tulip fabric paints, including one with “Nature” colors!!

I knew that these paints would change the hand of the fabric but hoped that it wouldn’t be too bad!!

I also purchased some new, wide brushes and also a new set of sea sponges….

This time I worked from a full-size template and used a black Inktense pencil to draw the lines onto the PFD (Prepared-for-dying) fabric. I found a fairly easy way to transfer the design by just lifting the fabric and roughly tracing the lines

The tracing looks really dark in the video but the lines were actually quite light.

After a bit of practice, I found that the paint worked better on a wet surface so I started out by misting the area that I wanted to paint. My first problem was that the black lines turned REALLY dark when the water was added!!!…..

But, as I added more and more water, and scrubbed the line using a “scrubber paintbrush”…..

….the lines finally faded out.

I used one bowl to do all of the paint mixing for the entire project and think that it helped to keep the colors in a similar tone…..

I sprayed each area and then started painting with short “X”- like strokes, adding more water as needed and continuing until the area was filled. I found that it worked better using an almost dry brush…..

After I had basically finished painting the area, I went back over some parts with a sea-sponge to add a bit more texture…..

When everything was dry, I added Sadie…..

….and LOVED how it looked.

BUT….. there are two problems with this painted background.

Firstly, it is REALLY stiff. The paints greatly changed the hand of the fabric.

Secondly, and even more disconcerting, the paints dried with a shimmer to them. They were labeled as Matte, but they obviously had some type of sparkle added in.

As much as I liked the overall look, the two problems made it unusable!!

So…come back tomorrow for try # FOUR!!!!