These are the wash fast acid dye samples above before steaming and washing.
These are the same samples after steaming and processing – but drat it, not in the same order, sorry. Note how the original rust and paprika colors turn almost a bright rose once processed and lighten down to shades of pink. I won’t use these in my palette. These also clumped together in the washer and I got a lot of back staining, so pink seems to have invaded almost every strip.
The grays and browns seemed to fare a lot better in the sampling and I’m optimistic about using the charcoal and smoke gray, less so with the mouse gray, which has the lavender cast to it. The brown works well too. The processed green has far more blue in it while the unprocessed color has far more yellow.
As I suspected, the new cloth I painted and printed also changed color in a few places as well once I steamed and washed it.
Dried dye, before steaming.
After steaming. The results are quite surprising and I’m going to check with Pro Chem tomorrow yet again to see if I’m overlooking some extremely important detail!
Where did all that wonderful warm, yellow gold go?? The areas where it remains are the ones where the application was the most concentrated. I actually discharged the top left and right quadrants on Friday after processing the piece where I had impulsively printed those dark brown marks. You can see that those are now a sort of rust color which quiets them down a little.
Needless to say, I was disappointed in these initial results. Part of me knows it’s just a first layer and I can work with additional layers of dye and paint to flesh out and complete that brown shape, but another part of me wants to set this aside and start over with a new piece of cloth and use this one to test out ideas.
I’ll decide once I get to my studio next which it will be!
I often resist doing samples, wanting to get to the main event. But I too have had some disappointing surprises which prove that the time to do samples is truly well spent. What a dramatic change in that last piece. I really like the before version, and had I not seen it, I think I would equally like the after version. But once something is in our heads, it's hard to see the change as good. You are probably right to set it aside for a bit and see what you think once you sort of forget your expectations and disappointment.
ReplyDeleteSheila, the results are still bothering me and probably will until I feel I understand what is happening and how I can assure it won't again! Appreciate your support of setting this aside -- question is, will I be able to?!?!
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