JoAnn asks, “What’s the best way to create black lines on silk, which will be 0.25-0.5 inch wide (0.5-1.0cm): gutta, outliner or black silk dye?”

Excellent question JoAnn – here’s a quick little video to show you some samples of my hand-painted silk scarves and why I chose the fine outliner for one (a gutta-like substance) and a thick paintbrush line on the other scarf – let me know if this doesn’t answer your question.

Prefer to watch on Youtube? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=begzqpd2Hv0

In this video I talk about the following techniques to create black lines on silk:

1. my water-based outliner with black dye added to it in a squeezy bottle, drawn with a finepoint nozzle/nib (this is like using gutta [pronounced “gootah”]) – I used this for very think sharp lines
2. broad brushstrokes using my water-based outliner with black dye added to it – for this I used a paintbrush rather than a squeezy bottle with a nib
3. another technique is to use the outliner to mark the outside edges of a wide space, which is then painted with black dye inbetween.

It all depends on what you’re trying to achieve — pick the one which will give you the best results with the least steps :-)

Halloween’s just around the corner!

In celebration of Halloween, I’m attaching a jpg/image of bats – this NOT to be used “exactly as is” – please download and copy parts you might want to use in a silk project, but please be aware you cannot exactly reproduce this entire image.

You are free to use these patterns as long as you keep to the rules in the following link: The patterns on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution – Noncommercial – Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Got another question for me?

Please do let me know by :

• popping over to the Facebook page
• sending a Tweet on Twitter
• emailing me
• creating a little video of you asking me your question
• OR … creating a voicemail message :-)

Ciao for now, happy painting!!
Teena!