Sunprinting on fabric

I finally made time to do some sun printing last weekend. I wanted to do some large pieces of fabric, which was a challenge. I also wanted to do multiple layers of paint to get some depth to the patterns.

Here is my setup. I lay my fabric out on an insulation board (from the hardware store). My board is about 4' long x 3' wide. My fabric is 6' long x 3-1/2' wide. For the first layer I did half the fabric and after it was painted and dried, I did the other half.

I find it easier to lay dry fabric on the board and wet it with a spray bottle, than to dampen the fabric first. I need to try to get the fabric as smooth as possible and it is much easier doing it section by section with a spray bottle. The fabric was pre-washed and dried in the dryer.  I am using 100% cotton sheet.

Here are my Setacolor paints. I keep them in these plastic containers with screw-top lids. I water them down about 50/50 (half paint/half water), screw the lid on and shake it. Make sure the lid is on tight.

Here is a collection of lace, doilies, stencils, etc to sun print with.

For this piece I layered two pieces of fabric. The bottom layer usually is more muted than the top, after they have been painted and dried. I often do this as it's like getting two pieces for the work of one.

For this first layer, I used two yellows and an orange. I used lace and lace doilies to sun print. They were very soft sun prints, due to the light paint colors.

This is after doing both sections of fabric, size is roughly 6' x 3-1/2'.

Here is a close-up of a doily print.

For the second layer, I painted on red, more orange, and fuchsia. I used stencils and plastic doilies with this layer.

I wanted to soften up the color transitions, so for the third layer, I did what I call Puddle Painting. I pour multiple paint colors onto a plastic lid (from a storage container) and smush my wrinkled up damp fabric into the paint. I will squeeze the fabric a little, unwrinkle it, then ball it up again and smush it into the paint again. I usually only have to do this twice to get good coverage on most of the fabric. I don't want to completely cover up the previous layer. I recommend wearing gloves. I puddle painted the entire fabric and had it span two different boards (since the fabric is longer than the boards). You can see my blog post demonstrating puddle painting here.

Here is the final piece, ironed. I think it's hard to tell how big the fabric is in these pictures. The round stencils are about 12" to give you a sense of scale.

Close up of the final piece.

As I said above, I put a second piece of fabric underneath when I painted the first layer. The colors were a muted yellow and orange on this bottom piece. I just added one more layer of paint to it, to create a more multi-colored piece. I used the puddle painting technique and used primary colors, cobalt blue, red, and yellow. I also included some fuchsia and some opaque turquoise. Setacolor opaque colors will not sun print, but I like this turquoise color and it adds some pop.

Here is the final piece and I think it is delicious.

Here are some close-ups.

I also like the back side, the colors and patterns are more subtle.

Back, close-up.

I think I will be combining some of the front and some of the back in my project.



But I'm not done sun printing.

I did a similar orange and yellow first layer on a smaller piece of fabric. This piece is about 2' x 3'. I layered a lot of smaller stencils on this piece.

I also did a narrow band of fabric that I put lace on top of.

Both these have a top and bottom layer of fabric.

Here is the top layer, after sun printing. I left this piece as is and did not print over it.

Here is the bottom layer.

The bottom layer I printed over using ultramarine blue and more stencils. I do not like the orange and dark blue contrast.  I am not sure what I will do with this piece. Maybe another layer?The area to the right where it was folded up it actually quite interesting.

For the narrow band, I cut it in half and overprinted one of them with red and fuchsia, with stencils.

Close-up. The dark yellow section does have the lace pattern printed on it, it is just hard to see in these pictures. As you can see, the section I over-painted with red and fuschia is quite different depending on the color of the underlayer. The part that looks orange was the darker yellow color like the piece above it.

Here is the lace and doilies I sun printed with. I did paint them some more after printing.

I also painted some cheesecloth, a Japanese inspired 60's fabric, and polyester dress lining. There is a certain kind of polyester that prints the wrinkles in the fabric really well.

More cheesecloth and the Japanese inspired 60's fabric.

I started the large fabric pieces, which were cotton sheets, with the sewn edges still on. They were preventing the fabric from being really flat on the boards, so I cut them off after applying the paint. I will be keeping them to incorporate in my project.

But wait, there's more. When I have my sun printing supplies out, I start looking for things to paint. I made some large fabric collage pieces previously, and decided to sun print a few. These were puddle painted. This is a big one, roughly 3' x3'.  I used a few stencils on it as well (circles and plastic doilies).

Before:

 After:

This one is 12" x 12". I dripped a little opaque turquoise on afterwards. Puddle painted with no sun printing.

This one is 12" x12". I think I may work on leaving more white on future pieces. Puddle painted with no sun printing.

And I just thought I'd add a few pictures of flowers from my yard. The back yard is more weeds than grass, but I do have these lovelies.

Northern Hibiscus

Surprise lily

Art Club, paint and collage project

 I recently started an art group through the UNK Women's Club and our first meeting was this weekend.

We worked on a painted and collaged piece inspired from a Lynne Perrella class I took many years ago.

We used four paint colors and photocopied images to create our artwork. We also cut out our images to create a stencil.


Here is the group at work.

 

 And here are our pieces.

Caroline

Debra

Melissa

Laura

Cristina

Annarose

Lisa's, in progress, I don't have a picture of it in a more complete state

Mine

Diana left before I remembered to take pictures, so her piece is missing from the gallery. (Sad face).

We had a great time, ate Melissa's excellent coconut brownies, and had wonderful artwork in the end.

Chicken monoprints

 This weekend I worked on some chicken monoprints with my new stencils.

I have some more with the background and main body printed, and I just need to do the detail stencil print.

Stencil making with my ScanNCut

I have been doing a lot of gelli printing and was previously designing my own stencils and cutting them out by hand.

I decided to get a ScanNCut as I wanted my stencil making to be quicker and easier.  The best part is, after you save a design, you can cut it again and again, and in different sizes. 

Here is a design I did using the "add shapes" function in word and and copying and pasting the repeated shapes.  I know that ScanNCut has their own software or website for making cut files, but I haven't tried it. I stuck with the "animal I know".

Here is my stencil. You can see I have some "hanging chads" that did not cut out completely, but these were easily cut out with an Exacto knife. 

In addition to the stencil, I know have all these diamonds I can use as masks.

This design I also did in Word, using the "insert shapes". These shapes are all just lines that I made a thick point width.

Here is my stencil. I can't wait to try it out.

So now we get to the type of stencil I really bought this machine to cut out. This type of detailed stencil would have been time consuming to cut by hand. And if I didn't like it in the end, I would have felt that all that time was wasted.  This is my image printed on paper.

 
 The ScanNCut does not disappoint (matte stencil). I love how much detail I can get with it.

And I thought I need an egg stencil as well. I just used the pre-programmed egg shape in the machine and added multiples and lined them up. Seriously, this took me 10 minutes to "design" and cut.

I love how much detail I can get with this machine.  I will add the following remarks.

-I like the matte stencil material better than the clear (both are Duralar .005 mil). I also think the matte cuts a bit easier for some reason. 
-Using the built-in designs gets a much cleaner cut, especially for round or curved shapes. I did some circles in Word (printed, scanned in and then cut), and they were very jagged around the edges.  Any hand drawn patterns are a bit rough around the edges (as in, not a nice smooth straight cut, a bit jagged). The straight lines from the Word documents (printed, then scanned into the machine) were straight and smooth.
-If you draw a small design, but then have it cut big, any unevenness in the drawing will be more obvious in the bigger version. (In other words, it is better to draw big, and cut small, instead of the other way around). 
-Sometimes there are cut lines where I don't want them. Usually these can be deleted without affecting the design (before cutting), but sometimes I miss one. I don't realize it until I have cut the stencil.  If it is a wide section, I will just use contact paper on both sides of the stencil to re-attach it. Otherwise, I either need to live with it (or cut out a section) or re-scan the picture and pay more attention (zooming in)  to all the cut lines.
- I always have some "hanging chads" (except the eggs) which need to be removed with an Exacto knife.
-I do think it's a bit on the pricey side, and it really comes with no instructions. I watched YouTube videos for a week before I even took it out of the box.

Is this machine perfect? No. Does it give me what I want? Yes, most of the time and with a little perseverance. I like the hand-drawn stencil quality I get with my hand-drawn drawings, but am no way a perfectionist anyway. I think it was a good investment for me and I have been using it quite a bit.