Friday, September 23, 2011

Fabric painting

I continue to be fascinated by painting on fabric. Recently I came upon a post about the transformation of an knock-off Eames chair. I was intrigued by the look and wondered if I could do it in fabric.

First I tried the technique described in the Martha Stewart tutorial on paper.
herringbone notecard masked
Then I tried it on canvas fabric. Because both paper and fabric are more porous than wood, I did not add water to the paint and glaze mix.
herringbone notecard
There is something pleasing about the subtlety of the paint on the fabric, but I if I were going to do a major project with this technique,  I’d have to explore using house paints and the kind of acrylic glaze used by faux finish painters. Fabric is much more porous than wood or paper, so it used a lot of paint and glaze.
That said, I’m happy with the durability of latex  house paint on fabric. I washed my sample in hot water with detergent and dried it in the dryer. There was some very slight fading, but not enough to warrant using expensive fabric paints or fabric medium additive.
Just another technique for the toolbox.

1 comment:

  1. Oh yay, so fun to see how your experiment went! Great work. I like the subtle pattern.

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