Cherubs - testing, testing

Here's how it's going. I'm still doing testers of this whole experience with the Tsukineko inks, and thought rather than arbitrarily decide if I need to make the cherubs larger, I'd try painting one up at the size they are currently to see if it will work.
The first photo is of the initial yellow and apricot colour washes.

The whole thing is almost non-existent at this stage, but I thought I should record them for posterity (and later when I think...how the heck did this go together?).
The second photo is the sepia wash... I like how things start to take shape here. I did a lot of really dry work at this stage, mostly with the brush point Fantastix.
There were a couple of spots with a bit of uncontrolled dye travel, but not too bad!
The next photos are of three consecutive washes...somehow I lost one of the photos in all the transfers. After the sepia I did a light orchid wash to try to set my figure into a bit of background. This was followed with a darker wisteria coloured wash to push in some nice dark areas and give the figure some contrast.

The second last photo is once the dark (almost an ultramarine blue) was touched in - this is when things started feeling really good to me! I love that warm/cool tension. I played around with different background colours off at the edge of the fabric, thinking I'd fill the whole works in and have a large stitching area to work in for the next step, but everything seemed far too strong in colour - or too garish.

I was pleasantly surprised that the white that was included in the set that I got was really nice and light, yet opaque enough to be used for highlights. The final picture is of the piece as it sits right now on my ironing board. The highlights are subtle, but they do help a little.


As with yesterday, I saved larger photos so that anyone wanting a close up can click on the picture to enlarge it. You may not want to if you have a slow connection, though!

One of the hardest things is trying not to 'overwork' the image...that's partly why I didn't end up putting any background in. The goal is for a natural image, not one that is opaque and over painted. When the dyestix are in my hand it can be really hard to know when to stop!

The white 'dye' was nice enough that I went back into the snake painting from yesterday and painted over some of the really big colour bleed areas. I'm looking forward to the stitching stage on both of these, now, as the hand of the fabric has not been affected by the dye process, and it'll be neat to see how they stitch up.

Happy stitching,
Lisa