Ginko Scarf for Mary
While taking the tailor jacket course I showed Mary some of the silk scarves I've painted. She liked my designs and offered to teach me pants drafting and construction in exchange for a scarf. Her only stipulation for the design was a light blue color and ginko leaves be incorporated. I was happy to oblige.
I started by drawing a bunch of ginko leaves to practice. Then I sketched up and colored a design on paper to play with placement and color scheme. I've made warped grids like this before and decided to only color in half of the squared to create an intricate checkerboard design.
After drawing the entire design in gutta and letting it dry for a day, I began coloring the scarf in. This takes constant concentration to not mess it up, because putting it in a wrong square will mar the design visually.
Despite my best efforts I did make a couple mistakes on this scarf. I drew too many of the top grids lines so in some places when painting in the grid around a ginko the design wouldn't match up properly on the other side, so I had to figure out how to blend it in so it'll look correct at first glance. I'll let you figure out where the patterns don't match up if you want.
For the leaves themselves I couldn't decide on a way to represent the veins that looked good to me, so I decided to just salt-dye the leaves to add some visual texture to the scarf. I used regular table salt and left it on for a couple of hours. I'm honestly amazed how well that worked I can't wait to experiment with different salt grain sizes to see how that effects it. Finally I sent Mary's scarf out to be steamed by another silk artist which had dramatic results as you can see in the rightmost picture, At home I don't have a steamer so I used Jaquard's dye fixative concentrate which works in about 30 seconds as opposed to steam fixing which takes 3+ hours. I'm definitely going to invest in a steamer in the future the colors are so much more vibrant it's most apparent comparing the yellows.