Thursday 27 April 2017

Garden Flower Background.

 I felt like a change from the carving and printing yesterday, so I returned to the third in the series of flowers from gardens that I have visited over the month of April. This new one is of a 'Native Rose' Diplolaena grandiflora, and the flower is indeed grand. Here I'm selecting fabrics for the piece, which will be pretty naturalistic as are the other two in the series.
 As I suspected, getting the speckled velvety look of the petals is a challenge. I tried dotting the base orange fabric with various stamped dyes, which looks O.K close up but doesn't give the almost furry look that I want. I don't really want to go with actual velvet, but it might be the only way in the end.
 Not much luck with the background either, but it's the only fabric that I have in the stash that's possible.
Here I've printed the background on sealed Lutradur. I used matt gel medium on the left which shows more of the Lutradur's transparency and with white gesso on the right which gives a more opaque white look to the print. The more white version is closer to the actual colour of the plant leaves. The lower piece of duplicated print is to add to my sample book for Lutradur, showing the different results of various sealants.

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