Here is some of our student work from a fun workshop I taught last week along with Lisa Sylvestre at her studio (link: asil). We’ve taught this before but this time we’ve really nailed the tricky business of drawing loads of intense colour out of our dyes, and getting them thick enough to work with easily with no bleeding.
We made extracts from nine different dyestuffs: buckthorn, osage, sappanwood, Himalayan rhubarb, lac, madder, eupatorium with iron added, cutch with soda ash, and cutch with iron. I have some ideas for expanding our palette for next time but just look at what our students achieved with this beautiful range!
These are all a combination of printing (with round felt blocks) and painting with brushes, on cotton bandannas pre-mordanted with gallnut tannin and aluminum sulfate.
These two above were done by the same person, and I love how one is like chemistry and the other biology.
This one has a lot of nice blending that we weren’t sure would come through the steaming process intact, but it did:
We were all very excited at how much of the texture of the original drawing came through in the final product in that central area here:
There were a few more we didn’t get photos of, but hopefully I’ll be able to show them to you soon. Spoiler alert: they’re gorgeous.
Lisa made up a few samplers, the first simple blocks of each colour we used, and the second a chart of colour combinations to get a sense of how they might blend:
There’s still some dye left over, so later this week I’m going to do some screenprinting with it, on plain mordanted fabric and on some that’s already been dyed. Stay tuned! And keep an eye on our class listings at asil.ca if you want to try this yourself; we’ll soon be adding a few more sessions for spring and summer.
this post is cross-posted to my studio weblog (link: levigator press)