Three Tips to Start doing Silk Painting

Silk is a material to capture your talent, it is also a very delicate and sensitive material, so it needs to be worked very carefully. Here are three essential tips which have been helpful to me over the years.

1. Tighten the silk

It seems like fundamental advice; however, the more tense the silk is, the easiest you can: trace your design, apply the gutta, and paint. The trick is to tighten it "just to the point", without tearing it by the force you use when mounting it on the frame, and without leaving it loose, for fear of tearing it -worth the redundancy.

Taking advantage of the tension of silk means finishing your work in less than seven days because it will loosen. You can tighten it again as you gain experience, but I recommend completing your task in a week.

2. Label the brushes by color

Another piece of advice that may seem ordinary or even obvious, but it is essential to remember it precisely for that reason. To paint the silk, "dyes" are used, usually sold in jars of 30 ml or 125 ml, and the color is applied directly from them. If you are very concentrated and change color without changing the brush, you will spoil the bottle’s contents because you will contaminate the entire bottle.

For example, you are painting with blue, and you want to put some yellow touches... with the same brush of blue... Say goodbye to your yellow jar because you just turned it green. If it is a 125 ml bottle and you just opened it, perhaps the amount of blue dye on the brush does not alter all the content significantly; however, it is better not to take that risk.

3. Finish the job in less than seven days

In addition to the tighten issue (which I mentioned in the first point), while using the gutta technique, the gutta will "harden" as time goes by, and it will permeate the tissue. How does this affect silk? After vaporizing it and washing it, it will be much more difficult to remove it from the silk. You will need to wash it several times (up to four, in my experience) to remove the gutta altogether, and the silk will regain its characteristic softness.