Silk painting update

Nov 23 --The black resist holds a fairly good line, as does the gold; I am still having trouble with the clear. It doesn't come out evenly, and it spreads so that the line you see when it first lays on the fabric gets much wider. In this case it picked up the marker on the line drawing below the silk. 

Nov 30--The black and gold resists looked good--but they did not hold up as resists at all! They worked well on two previous pieces, but when I applied dye on this one, it went right through the line!! The gold bird now has splotches of red and green, and the dark blue of the "Hundred Family Coat" bled right through into the fields and pathway the boy is standing on! The only thing I can figure is that it was cooler the day I put it on, and that meant the resist didn't go through the cloth but sat on top. I am using a heavy silk....can't remember the name right off...19 mm wieght...but it is the same weight cloth I used for the previous pieces. 

Images for Chinese folk tales series

When I told a Chinese friend I was doing a series of paintings based on stories I learned while visiting in China, she asked if I was going to do the illustrations in Chinese style. I told her no, I am not Chinese. I can only do the illustrations as I see them through my own western eyes. My purpose is to share my experience of China through my silk painting, not to copy Chinese art. 

Here is the line drawing for Peacock Princess, a famous story of the Dai people in Yunnan Province in Southern China. I saw this story, which came originally from India,  celebrated through dance and illustrated in stone at Xishuanbanna forest preserve just outside of Jinghong. In this scene, her husband the prince has been falsely reported killed, and the kings advisor has accused her of being a witch, saying she must die. The princess says with her husband dead, she does not want to live anyway, and asks to perform one last dance with her peacock cloak. With her cloak on, she can fly, and flies away home to her father the sun.

silk painting update

Still exploring different resists and dyes, looking for the best match for the series I have in mind. 

This image is one I have been trying to express in several different media: watercolor, monoprint, colored pencil, and now silk serti painting. You can see how the resist did not hold up on the trees in the front left. I tried to fix this by painting a resist onto the silk and painting with dye on top of the resist. Not very successful, I think.