GET SPOTTED

For my large framed paintings I use clear water-soluble gutta as the resist and draw a sequence of lines to delineate the painted areas as I develop my silk painting using iron-fixed silk paints. However sometimes I want to achieve an effect that is not possible using gutta and I turn to the results of my experimental work with decorative effects and stencils to find a way of creating the effect.

In my painting 'Spotted Orchid' I wanted the petals to be lightly spotted. If I had used gutta to draw the individual spots the process would have been very laborious and the spots would have been too bold. I wanted a naturalistic effect that I knew a stencil would give.

To achieve this effect I made a stencil for the spots on one petal. I used an A5 sheet of overhead projector transparency film. I cut the large holes with a scalpel blade and the small holes with a heated stencil cutter. I cut the design in the centre of the sheet leaving a wide border. The wide border is important because if it is too narrow paint can seep to the edge of the stencil and mark the silk.

The stencil was used in two ways. It was used in the conventional way by daubing paint through the holes onto damp silk and drying with a hairdryer, but mostly I used the 'magic' method I have discovered where the paint is first applied to damp silk and then the stencil is laid into the wet painted area before being dried quickly with a hairdryer. Because the pattern of spots was not the same on each petal I used different sections of the stencil and I also turned the stencil over for some petals.