Silk painting

This is the craft of painting onto a silk fabric background. There are a number of different techniques to achieve this. Whichever technique you use it is recommended that you first wash your silk and make sure that there are no products or grease on it and that it has done any shrinking that it might do. Once washed the silk then needs to be stretched onto a frame. It is easy to stretch your silk onto a frame. The frame should be a wooden one large enough for the entire design to fit within the frame. Then you pin through the silk and into the wooden frame to hold the fabric in place stretching it as you go. Make sure that you use either steel pins or silk pins as you need to reduce the risk of any staining from the pins onto the fabric. The pins need to be about four or five inches apart so that there isn’t any sagging of the fabric. It needs to be tight enough so that it stays taut whilst you are painting but not too tight as it may tear.

Firstly there is the technique where the flow of pigment is controlled by the placement of a resist rather than the exact placement of the colour itself. You need to decide on the design that you want to set out on your silk. The design is formed by using a product called ‘gutta’ which acts as a resist. When doing your design you need to think very carefully about how it will
work. The gutta needs to form an enclosed shape so that the dye or silk paint does not escape; it needs to be held within the gutta lines. The gutta can be colourless and is meant to be removed at the end of the process leaving a clear defined edge to the design where the colour of the fabric shows through. There are also coloured guttas available that are meant to be left on the design and give a coloured border to the shapes.

Secondly you can use the dyes or silk paints just as you would water colours. They will flow easily across the fabric and blend into each other. You can spray the silk with water in varying amounts to increase the flow in different areas. The paints can be applied using a brush, a mister, a sponge, an eye dropper in fact in any way that you want – it is a great medium to experiment and play around with. There are also other things that you can add to the fabric to create beautiful effects. If you sprinkle salt onto the wet dye or paint and then leave it in place until it has totally dried, then brush off the salt – you get a wonderful speckled effect. Also if you add alcohol to the paint it will give a beautifully blended effect.

A third technique for painting on silk is to use a primer first that will stop the flow of the dyes or paints. This is painted onto the silk fabric and allowed to dry before starting to apply any paint. It is important that you get the correct primer for the paints or dyes that you are using as some stop-flow primers will only work with specific paints or dyes.

At the end of all these three techniques the silk dyes or paints will need to be fixed in order to make the design permanent. The process of fixing will vary between the different products. It is best to check the instructions on the product that you have chosen. Most of them use heat for fixing or setting the pigments. This is a very easy process as you can just use an iron, with a press cloth on top of the silk. It might also be advisable to put a cloth under your silk as well to protect your ironing board. To heat set the dyes use a circular motion working across the fabric to ensure that each section receives the required length of heat to set it but not too much at once so that it scorches the fabric. Other products use steam and sometimes a chemical fixative to set the pigments. Where these processes are needed you should follow the manufacturers’ instructions carefully as they can be a little more complicated than heat setting.