Sun Prints with Karen Eckmeier

hi I'm Karen F Meyer I'm a fiber artist and quilter and I'd like to share with you today a technique that I just have a lot of fun with it's called Sun printing with tissue paper it's a sunny day here in Connecticut the skies are clear note no clouds so it's perfect for her son printing I wrote about this technique if you're familiar with quilting arts magazine that was back in summer of 2006 and a lot of people have asked me well to give us more details we'd like to see it in action so here we are Sun print starts with a Sun sensitive paint called set a color it's real important that you get and I'm not sure how the company says it's poppy oh I think it's a French company set a color but you want the transparent paints there's opaque but we want the transparent paints because those are Sun sensitive comes in different sizes you can see this is the big size medium and this is the size that you would get in a little sample pack so what are some prints how do you do a Sun print what does it do to the fabric here's a great example here's a non-skid grid mat if I put that on the wet fabric and I put it in in the Sun to dry look at this wonderful grid I get the Sun it is a resist that's what we're doing here we have these fun little lizards they were placed on the fabric and when I took it off I had little lizards of course my I'm the quilted lizard fiber art studio so I would want to do that a lot of people love to pick leaves or ferns if we put the fern on the wet paint once it's dry we remove it and it's it you just get this wonderful image and a real clear sunny day gives you nice crisp results so how did the Sun printing lead to Sun printing with tissue paper well I had learned that using white tissue paper and just like the little lizard or the firm that you saw if I put it on the wet fabric I would get all these great textures um just just really neat the crinkly look of the the to the tissue and and so that I was doing that for several years and one day I ran out of white tissue paper oh good grief what am I going to do so I reached to my wrapping supplies and I had a bunch of tissue papers and I grabbed some of them and it turned out that I had the tissue paper that bleeds which turns out to be a good thing and what happens is that when I put my tissue papers I was just kind of doing these kind of rips strips the tissue paper the colors would bleed with the paint they would bleed with each other and I would get these wonderful surprises of color and texture so how do you know whether the tissue you paper that you have in stock is going to work or not ideally the paper that you have to wrap gifts shouldn't leave and it should say bleed resistant or something or non bleeding that's a big advertisement because you don't want to wrap something up and really nicely and then have water get on it and it'll bleed so how do we know what you have the easiest way is to get a little bit of water and we're going to just I have samples of a couple two different kinds of tissue paper here and you're going to see as I put the water on we have the color diffusing into the paper towel isn't that fun okay now you can see on these there's no no no nothing is oh here we had that one must have come from that side that's a bleeding one but none of these others are bleeding at all the others are just really just going right into the fab but that's what we want the sure way to know that you're going to get a bleeding fabric is to get what's called the spectra art tissue it's advertised it's called bleeding art tissue then you know you've got the right tissue okay now let's use that idea of the colored tissue paper bleeding onto fabric and I have a couple examples here to show you so here's an example of the tissue paper cut into squares and you'll notice sometimes you get in a very nice clean edge and at other times if there's a lot of water or depends on the tissue paper it will just lose its shape completely or you'll get a little texture I'm here I've added some strips to it and here I've made like a little patchwork here are some other examples on this one I've cut strips and like little confetti pieces so we almost did I was thinking garden but it's almost an underwater scene you get wonderful transparency a couple other examples here very abstract effect we've cut some rectangles in there and every now and then I see there is actually a piece that's still left you can leave the paper on here they're not meant to be washed I just want to show you a couple samples here it's kind of addicting you just never know what you're going to get okay I said sometimes it's hard to tell whether the paper still there or not here's one with it more triangles in a darker color wonderful purple here's one where I actually left this fabric on I did it in a grid and you'll notice here the fabrics here are the tissue and I could peel some of that away I kind of like the look at that just to see what actually happens but if I might just leave that there so we have a lot of different opportunities but for today I'm going to demonstrate doing the torn strips of fabric to create a multicolor piece okay so today we're going to or I'm going to demonstrate to show you a multicolor fabric with the torn tissues okay and we're going to start with I'm working on a poster board and I've cut a piece of plastic to protect the poster board so I can use it several times and I'm using I actually have two different kind of fabrics I'm going to use today both of by Robert Kaufman one is a hundred percent cotton its PFD which means it's prepared for dyeing and the other one and I've marked them differently just so I know which is which this is my one hundred percent cotton and this is my pima text which is a cotton poplin it's a tighter weave it's a combed cotton so we'll see the difference between how the paint sits on these fabrics so I'm ready as a cook I have my museum plots I have all my paints ready and so how did I go about mixing these paints the set of color transparent paints it's a concentrate in here and so what I do I find you'll see an array of different sized containers here whatever I have and I mix it half concentrate and half water if I want a deeper color I might not put as much water in I could use this straight so that's what I've mixed here and I've actually added even a little bit more OOP some water into that and it's good to have a different brush for each of your colors so we are all set to go first I like to look there so tissue from another piece I did we don't want that Nixon with the others we're going to wet the fabric first because we're getting basically going for a watercolor effect and it will be - obviously - dry if I don't wet the fabric so we get it all nice and white and wet it is white we're gonna we're going to mess with that okay I have just basic colors I have yellow red eye purple just because I love purple I put that over here blue and green okay just some basic colors and while that is still wet I'm going to just paint a strip of yellow down here I want to be quick I want to do this before it dries and I'm going to put another some red here notice this is highly scientific okay we're just trying to get the color down I might give it a little zap of water just to let it leave and now I've already um torn up strips of tissue paper and I'm going to start putting them on the wet fabric okay I'm just gonna try not to think too much about it just let it happen just kind of pick them up see what happens so now we're ready to take it out in the Sun to dry let's put it in a nice sunny spot all pinned down ready to go and look it's already we've got some leak things happening over here so why don't we go and make another piece while that was drying okay let's try another fabric let's kind of let's think of a sunset warm colors and we're just going to use yellows and reds and maybe a little bit of purple now I have purple mixed already but I want it to be a little lighter so I'm going to put just a smidge in another container and there's also a set of color makes pearl and gold now these are opaque they're not transparent but what happens when you add that opaque pearl to any of the colors and then we need another brush what you're going to get is a lighter version I've got a nice lavender of that purple now it's a little bit thick so I'm actually going to add a little bit more water just so that it'll be easier to use okay so I've got my red yellow and lavender for really pretty what I'm hoping this sunset sky one never quite knows what one will get okay so nice and wet here and I'm going to just kind of add the streaks of the Sun here I'm just going to kind of get it on there I'll be like I can I can hear the difference this is the combed cotton it's a much finer weave and we'll see whether you see the difference in the results she's going to add a little bit of a red these colors will dry a lot lighter than what you see here on camera and you'll see that later when we have the finished product now we're going to start to add our torn tissue papers the pinks and the oranges and lavender and just kind of work fairly quickly so things do not dry okay we're ready to go out in the Sun again I thought while the other pieces were drying that I would show you what it looks like working with squares so I've taken my tissue papers I've lined them all up so that I can cut a whole bunch of squares and I'm going to use my rotary this is the pizza cutter of the quilting world it's a round blade used for cutting fabric but in this case we're going to cut tissue and I'm just going to cut a bunch of 1-inch strips here I'm not aiming really for precision look at this wonderful confetti oh we have some rectangles too that's good we're ready to play with some squares and some confetti that I made here I'm gonna start off get more fabric wet okay and maybe I'll just paint the fabric and squares like a little square of yellow a couple of those odd numbers are always good do some I when I'm putting my colors down I don't think too much about color theory but I do know that when I put yellow and red together I will get orange I know that if I have my blue next to my yellow I'm going to get green so I think of those things I'm getting with some this purple this lavender that I have that's got the pearl essence in there and now I'm ready to add the squares of tissue paper okay again very scientific we're just gonna put them on here where are my tweezers that would work well we'll use fingers got to be quick okay I found my tweezers in the meantime and we're just going to separate these you can see they're already mixing with each other already to see that that's amazing you do have to work quickly of course you could put them down one at a time but I only have so much patience we'll just add a couple more here and there picking them up one at a time is probably smarter and you see here we really can't control what's going to happen as far as what colors go where cuz we've got an assortment of colors I mean I could have planned my colors but this is just to give you some ideas we're set to go out in the Sun let's see what we have oh my goodness you've got some fun stuff going on here okay look what the confetti tissue paper wow that's fun stuff a little wet but okay remember we had several layers but it doesn't matter we got a nice transparency effect with a lot of them the tissue paper is off now so let's look at the details what a great explosion of colors it looked like a mess when we had all those fabrics on or the tissues on top of each other but look at all these wonderful mixtures and we've got shapes and transparencies whoops still have a little bit of tissue paper you'll be finding those for a while oh look a whole bunch look at that let's check out the other one I'll move this one aside this is the one where I Criss crossed the strips they're actually left some of the tissue paper in there I like that I've got some nice fun effects there so if I didn't say it before these have been heat set on the reverse side with an iron and I've done that with our other pieces of fabric too so let's take a look at those here's the first one that we worked one got all our different colors definitely got some mud going on there but it's not a bad thing and I've been doing this for many many years and I'm just going to bring a couple other pieces over and you'll notice that every time I do it it's always a little bit different it depends on the tissues that I've selected might be the mood to colors sometimes I take more time with my colors and other times I do not and sometimes it bleeds more also depends on type of day what I'm really liking with this one picture is that I see a little scene next let me get my mat what I'm seeing in this fabric is that I'm finding a couple abstract landscapes very abstract here we've got a nice warm sunset sky that's kind of an interesting part to use and over here we have in another piece doesn't that look like a a Blue Ridge Mountain that was just a blue torn piece of tissue paper and a wild sky I didn't intend to make landscape but it did happen accidentally here's our sunset sky I think this one turned out really nicely we stayed with one color palette we did our yellows and reds and then we wound up with pink but we also use pink and yellow and orange a little bit of that lavender the strip so I think we have a nice sunset there while you weren't looking I did a water fabric I did blues and greens and I think that's that's quite nice that would be fun to cut into to create a landscape the question I've asked myself and I figured people will ask me how color fast how how long will these colors last so I did a little test this was a piece of fabric that I painted 13 years ago and so I took let's see which one this one I washed it and I washed it purposely in a warm water and soap of instead of cold just to see how much it would bleed or not bleed and I'm surprised I don't see any fading of color it all looks pretty true so I hope I've given you a few ideas today and I'm going to show you in the following pictures some of my work and how I incorporate this painted fabric with the tissue in my pieces here's enchanted village this is a fabric collage with tissue paper some prints here's a close-up here's positive energy five this is pieced squares with some collage triangles here's a close-up to get a better look this is medieval this is a miniature fabric collage based on my happy villages book this features the tissue some prints and the border here is tiny town this is another miniature happy village which uses the fabric in the sky and the water and in the borders this is color rific quilters it's part of a series of patterns that uses fused shapes and the tissue paper some prints are in the border just a perfect frame all squared away this is a large piece it's fabric collage with carefully placed squares of tissue paper on a smaller scale we have all squared away and out of order and last but not least this is my chakra flower garden collage and I think the Sun print fabrics was the perfect way to finish it off thank you so much for joining me and have fun painting with tissue paper bye for now you

Channel: Karen Eckmeier

Views: 58,124

Rating: 4.9444447 out of 5

Keywords: Sun Printing, tissue paper, fabric painting, quilting, fiber art, fabric collage, quilted lizard, karen eckmeier, tissue paper painting

Id: egNrIy4jmpc

Length: 20min 58sec (1258 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 09 2015