Hand (dye) Painted Cotton

Eileen Gidman-Artist

Title: Red Accents with White Fences

3 Hand (dye) Painted Panels

Ever since completing a commissioned watercolour painting containing bicycles last year, I have wondered if I could paint bicycles on fabric. Finally I attempted it on this 11" wide panel.

With dyes, less detail is better as fine details are more difficult to achieve when using thickened dyes. By focusing only on the essential components to express what I wanted to convey in this painting I was able to eliminate anything extra. What did I want to say in this panel? Simply to draw attention to the irresistible shape of an old fashioned bicycle.

Watercolour & Textile Art

Watercolour Painting                               

Hand (dye) painted Textile

Seeeeing double? No, one of my watercolour painting looked so much like a textile design that I was eager to try painting it on fabric.

A triad colour scheme was used. Joen Wolfrom's 3-in-1 Color Tool' is an excellent resource for colour selection. Spring Green #4, Blue Violet #12, and Orange Red # 20 were selected with the Red Orange being the principle colour and the Spring Green being an accent colour.  To draw the viewer's eye to the highlighted flowers careful consideration was given to providing some shades of the choosen triad.

The 3-in-1 Color Tool or a colour wheel would be helpful in selecting additional fabrics to sew this Art Cloth into a finished piece - a designer pillow perhaps?

Has your quilt group ever examined your collectively amassed fabric scraps (we save our scraps for 'doggie' beds)?  Yesterday, our quilt group did just that. Interesting!!! I guided the process during a workshop on colour theory and below are a few of the results.

Value: I asked the group to lay out each pile of colour swatches from light to dark. Wow! There were almost no light values and very few darks. Most colour swatches could be classified as medium values.
Adding gray to a colour creates a tone. There were very few examples of tones either and they were mostly mauve.

Colours in our stashes: The blue scrap pile was the largest followed by the red and green piles. The orange pile contained the fewest fabric swatches and yellow was limited too.

Colour Schemes in Print Fabrics: Print pieces were also examined to see if specific colour schemes were used in the fabric's design. We considered monochromatic, analogous, complementary, split-complementary, triad, and polychromatic colour schemes.  While there were a lot of fabrics in the monochromatic, analogous and complementary colour schemes there was only one fabric using a split complementary colour scheme and a few fabrics using the triad. Two fabrics were identified as using a polychromatic colour scheme.

Oh my goodness we are in love with the red-green complementary combination. All but one fabric in this category had the red-green colour scheme. These were not Christmas prints but they contained various values including a favored dusty rose and greyed green.

Conclusions: The quilt group uses a lot of medium values in our quilts and let me tell you there are beautiful quilts being made. If we had more value variety through lights, darks and tones and these can be hard to come by in some fabric stores, we would have even more choices for quilt making. We realized it was helpful to use a colour-tool or colour-wheel to help identify these values in the various colours.
Colour theory - I can never get enough of it. The more I learn the more I want to experiment. More on split-complements to follow.

Quilt Canada

May 29 to June 2, 2012

Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Look for me, Eileen Gidman, at my booth in the Merchant Mall.

An exciting new line will be available for the show- an east coast series. Lighthouses are one of the featured scenes and am I ever having fun painting them. Due to the height of lighthouses, perspective and composition are an exciting challenge.  

This panel contains 3 individual scenes that can be cut apart for adding into wall hangings, quilts and more. Several lighthouse panels will be available, however as each panel is an original hand dye-painted cotton piece, come early for the best selection.