Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Sun printing with leaves and branches

I love to sun print using Setacolor transparent paints.  We were trimming some trees the other day, and thought the trimmings would make great sun prints. Here is one of the first pieces that used cherry tree branches.


Here is what the fabric for this piece originally looked like.


I also sun printed on these two fabrics. A green silk.

An ice dyed cotton. I didn't know what to use this fabric for after I ice dyed it. The repeating pattern was so strong.


Here is the cherry piece after painting and placing the branches.

The silk piece.

The ice dyed piece.


The results for each.




I experimented with some additional fabrics.  Many of them were not quite as good as the first few. I think part of the reason was it was getting late in the day, so the sun was not as direct or as strong.


This piece is originally a sheer that had some splotchy green dye on it (kind of looked like camo).  


This piece is interfacing over cotton (sometimes I put a piece of cotton underneath, when I am painting a transparent fabric, since the paint easily bleeds through the transparent layer. This way I get two pieces at the same time).  I leaned this on a fence to try to get the sun to hit it directly.(It was getting very late in the day and the fence was the only place still getting some sun.)  It looks like this made the paint run (close up below). I think it looks a lot like a watercolor painting. I will definitely try having them dry vertically instead of horizontally to see if I can recreate this. I did pin my leaves to the board so they would stay in place when drying upright.

 Failed sun print on interfacing with cherry tree branches.
 Failed sun print of cherry tree branches on ice dyed fabric.

Sun print on previously dyed fabric using cherry tree branches.

I will be doing a post on Thursday doing sun printing on interfacing using stencils. I go into more detail about my sun printing process in that post if you want more details. I also have quite a few sun printing posts from last summer as well.

1 comment:

  1. Wow, I think this is some really cool designs for sun fabric printing.

    ReplyDelete