Painting on Silk for Beginners - Simple Rose Design

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Hello. Hello. I’m Teena Hughes from How-to-paint-on-silk.com and today I’d like to show you a little technique I use when I want to create simple flowers on silk. Now these sort of look like roses but they’re not perfect and they’re not detailed.

This is just with Silk, silk dye, paint brush and that’s about it. Okay, you ready? Let’s get started. I’ve prepared my silk by washing it first. It’s silk Habotai in eight mommei thickness and once it’s dried I’ve ironed it and attached it to a wooden frame with thumb tacks.

Now for the colours that I’m using today

I’m actually using hot pink as the only colour in the silk dye. But I’m using two bottles. One has full strength and one has 10% dye and 90% water. Now these little bottles that I’ve got, they look a bit raggedy.

They are old and the dye is quite old, so I’m using up dye that I’ve had for a couple of years and the bottles are almost empty. And before I wash out the bottles and add new dye, I thought I’d use up the old dye.

So on the screen, what you’re saying is me now opening up the two different bottles of dye and then going ahead and just making curved shapes starting in the center and then working outwards. So I’ve got a darker dye and then a lighter dye, both in hot pink and I’m moving around and just doing curves. So this is very simple for most people to do. There’s nothing that has to be perfect or spectacular. So if you can do that, then you’re all set to go. What I’m going to do after I’ve painted the two rose shapes is then use some marker pens to add a bit more outline to it.

So we’ll be getting to that in a moment.

So on the second rose — what’s happening is I’m just putting on the two bits of two types of pink and I’m using two different paint brushes and I’ve got no water that I’m using separately. I’m not dipping the brushes into water. So it’s whatever dye remains on the brush is all that I’m using.

So if you’d like to try this out, let me know how you get on. I would love to see your results.

I’m loving the Identi Pens!

These are the three Identi pens that I’ve just purchased and today’s my first play with them. So I’m very excited. As you can see on the screen, they are identi pen, now these are permanent markers. I’m very excited by this because for years and years and years, I’ve always written my name on silk scarves etc with gutta, and then when I moved to outliner.

And so to be able to use a pen is absolutely fantastic.

So before you all laugh at me, I know there’s a lot of people been using pens, but that’s not me because I just haven’t got around to finding the ones I like. I’ve tried a lot of them. Okay, so identi pen is great.

The three colours I have our black, purple and orange.

Now to get started, I’m going to use the orange one. And the great thing about each of these pens is that they have two different sized nibs on each end. So one is thicker and at the bottom there is a thin one. So this is terrific. So you’ve got two different levels of thickness that you can draw or write with using the identi pens. So to get started, I’m using the thick one in the orange and I’m just going around the outside of most of the hot pink shapes at the moment on the first rose.

I don’t have to be perfect here.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m just outlining, this is just a play date. This is not something that I’m selling to a customer or I’m going to do anything fabulous with. These are just the days that I play with silk and the lines don’t have to be perfect. So it’s sort of like doodling, I guess if you like, so I put down a bit of colour and one or two shades maybe more. And then I’m just going around with the outliner. So this is to test the outliner as well as to play around with the silk dyes. Now I will give you a little tip. I’m filling in some gaps here with the orange marker and just to see how that’s going to look. Now bear in mind, I’m not going to be a steam setting these colours, I’m not doing anything fancy at the end.

Remember — I’m just playing on this piece of silk

So even though that might look awful on the screen right now, it’s just me having a play and putting the pens to the test. So I’m putting in some more details and just seeing what the pen is looking like. So I have tested these pens by writing on some silk and then washing the silk and the colour didn’t come out at all. It looked perfect. So they are definitely a hundred percent permanent. So now I’m going to write my name on the silk and this is a watershed moment for me. Very exciting. Yes. Now what I’ll do with the next one, I’ll use the finer one, the finer point. So on the second tentative rose, I’m using the purple permanent marker, the identi pen, and we’ll just see what that looks like to see if that’s more interesting or just how I feel about it.

Now I don’t necessarily get to use these in any projects, but if they’re good enough I could turn them into silk bookmarks. I could cover a book, I can just do some small things with them, especially as I’m not, I have no intention of steam setting these colours or making them permanent in any way. So just having a bit of a dabble having a play. And because I’ve done a lot of graphic design over the years, I love black outlines on everything, so it’s nice to be able to use purple and orange here and do my name in other colours to match the design that I’m painting on the silk.

Have you tried any pens to write on your silk?

I’d love to hear what you’re using and if you like it and what you, what your results have been. So do feel free to let me know.

Alright, now what I’m going to do — I’m done for today — I’m going to show you what I did earlier. There’s another little flower there in the centre. And as we move along, you can see his, some I did earlier. These are with the hot pink and yellow, the yellow dye, was really, really crazy and had thick lumps in it. But still the yellow and the pink look great together. And as I just scroll back, we’ll come back to what I’ve done today and I’m quite happy with my results. I hope you’ve enjoyed this.

This is cheerio from me,

Teena Hughes from How-to-paint-on-silk.com

If you’d like to know more about silk painting: