Following on from Mary’s lecture on 5th July about her travels to Uzbekistan, India and Vienna and how they inspired her work, we spent a day learning how to apply her transfer painting techniques. After an introduction to the techniques, we spent the morning preparing our painted and printed papers. Some sheets were covered with a single colour whilst others were decorated with mixed colours, printed designs or washes. We used carved wooden printing blocks, bubble wrap, sponges and even our fingers to decorate the paper.
Another suggestion from Mary was to photocopy a design and paint it with a brush. There was deep concentration from everyone while we tried to keep within the lines. Some of us were more successful at this than others!
Once our sheets were decorated, we laid them out to dry during our lunch break.
Mary then showed us lots of examples of her work and explained how we could use various materials and objects to mask areas of the fabric when transferring the paint.
Cheap nylon lace makes a delicate mask. It also picks up the colour from the paint and can be used for a second row of printing. Finally you can attach the lace itself.
Acetate stencils make wonderful masks as shown here. A similar effect can be achieved with paper doilies. The paper also absorbs some of the colour and can then be used to make a further print.
Mary’s trips to India enabled her to bring back many examples of local textile work and design ideas. Elephants feature frequently in her work. These elephants were printed with a wooden block onto paper first. This is very useful because you can cut away unwanted splodges of paint and choose to use your best prints.
Mary also layers up designs with lots of block printing, as shown here, and then embellishes the design with beads and simple hand stitching.
In this example of Mary’s work, you can see how she created the background by weaving strips of painted paper then transferring the paint to the fabric. She then cut out further painted shapes and ironed them onto the background. Decorative machine stitching gives the effect of applique.
We used a hot iron to transfer the paint onto our fabric, making sure that we used a sheet of baking parchment beneath and on top of our work. Jean looks very happy to be doing the ironing for once!
Finally, here are just a few examples of our work. Thank you, Mary, for sharing your ideas, inspiration and experience with us.
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