Sun printing again

We finally got some sun today, to do our sun printing. It really was the perfect day, sunny and warm, not too hot.

In my first print, I wanted to experiment with several different items I'd been saving for sun printing. I bought some cheap foam alphabet letters from the kids section of the supermarket, and I wanted to see what they looked like, as a way of adding text to my work. I also had some yarn snippets, some rubber bands and a plastic shape from packaging. Here's how it looks: It's kind of fun, though it's hard to imagine actually doing anything with this. Perhaps inspiration will strike me one day. However, it's quite an interesting and easy way to add text to fabric, and the textural effects from the rubber bands and yarn snippets are good too. The paints used were Setacolor Soleil, used wet on wet, but not diluted. The fabric was taped to a glass board for painting and drying.

My second print was onto one of my paint rags, which had splotches of paint, mostly blue, on it. I sloshed over some green Setacolor transparent paint, diluted about 1:1, wet on wet, and laid down a paper cut-out of a marguerite daisy from an earlier project. I'm very happy with how this turned out. The transparent paint allowed the previous colours to show through, and the sun printing effect was surprisingly clear on the daisy, since the fabric was laid anyhow straight onto the grass, and actually blew away at one stage.

My third print was also on a paint rag, which had uneven splotches of different colours, mostly red, blue and brown. It looked like this: Pretty boring, huh? I mixed some blue and yellow Setacolor Soleil to make an olive green - someone called it avocado but I think they were being polite! I wanted to see how the Soleil range of paints went over other paints. If I were a systematic (anal?) person, I'd know what those paints were. They're likely to be Setacolor paints, but they may be acrylics, with or without textile medium added. I added some ferns from Prue's garden, and a fairly heavy sprinkling of ordinary salt, through the middle. The result was this: Now this has possibilities! I was surprised to see that the Soleil behaved much like transparent paints over other media. The salt was not as obvious as the larger salt crystals but it gave a delicate speckled pattern to the middle of the fabric. On this one, I diluted the Soleil a little.

My final print was inspired by a serendipitous discovery by Prue. She had been using glass over her first prints (to follow) and it gave a distinct colour difference. We wondered aloud what effects other transparent media would give us. I sloshed some blue and green Soleil onto wet cream fabric, and laid down the marguerite daisy patterns (wish I'd had a third one!) and three transparent plastic drinking glasses. I didn't fill them with water, which might have been a useful strategy, as then they wouldn't have blown away, as two did. But the effect was this: Isn't that interesting? You can see where the bottom left one fell over. I wonder whether adding water to the cups would change the image?

I found this absurdly easy as a technique (assuming you have the required sunny day!), and something that offers a lot of possibilities for altering fabric in interesting ways.

Nola