Now I know how cats feel.
Ever since I saw this fabric sun print idea I’ve always wanted to try it. I have no idea why or how it works without light sensitive paper (just fabric and fabric paint!), it all seems really magical to me, so I really want to see if it really works!
Finally a really sunny day came upon us and I grasp the opportunity :D We have a west-facing balcony and only get direct sunlight on it in the late afternoon. And it’s only a strip of sunlight because of the balcony railing. I used canvas and some watered down screen printing ink for fabric, because that’s what I have.
It was also really windy, so I placed stones on the leaves to keep them from being blown away. Then I thought maybe stones will make good patterns too, so I laid them on the wet canvas as well.
It’s like paintings that make themselves! I only had to wait two hours for them to sit in the sun. And go out 4–5 times to move the cardboard with all the canvases on it because the strip of sunlight was shifting (more quickly than I thought!).
And finally, here are the results! :D These are the two that came out a bit more clear. The edges of the leaves kept flapping about because it was so windy (and it’s always windy up where we are) and so it didn’t make a good solid imprint. And because I used dried, pressed leaves, which didn’t stick to the wet canvas. I think next time I’ll try to find fresh leaves for this.
These two turned out less clear so I later painted something on top of it. But here they are :D
After those prints were done the sunlight was coming into the apartment with the balcony door open, so I tried to do another print with a thinner kind of leaf. They stuck to the wet paint and lied perfectly flat on the canvas so I was expecting really good prints…
But the sun was only there for an hour and a half, before the print was done. But the silhouettes of the leaves are still faintly visible. Kind of ghostly. There’s something I really like about that, enough to make me save the image and not recycle the canvas.
The two red/orange ones that didn’t come out clearly I did recycle. They turned into these…
I was trying to see if masking fluid would work on raw canvas. I’ve only ever used it on paper, which is what it’s meant for. So! The verdict? It’s a no. Masking fluid does NOT come off of raw canvas. It came off of these paintings because they had a thin coat of screen printing ink on them to start with, but still, it took me a long time to rub (and sometimes scrape) off the dried masking fluid, which left my index fingertip raw and dyed blue and its nail broken. But it’s worth the effort, I think! Because the colours turned out great :D (and broken nail grows out in a few short days)
Masking fluid, however, works like a dream on primed canvas. More on that later! :D
Happy Thursday!Â
