Tag Archives: cotton fabric

Painted Fabric – Cardboard Resist

This is the first cardboard resist piece I made, it was made on a painted (light wash) piece of fabric and I used two colors for the design. Read on to find out more and for the How-to video see below.

For this next piece I left some of the backside tip fabric unpainted (no yellow), once dry and pressed I painted orange dots to the centers. I didn’t like that result, they felt too deliberate. The holes were in a tighter placement and I don’t think the overall results were as good, BUT maybe it’s just the colors; I think these colors would have been more striking on a white background.

Below is the only piece (so far) painted on white fabric, the picture doesn’t show how pretty it really is. I forgot to take a photo before I cut some pieces out, that’s the photo-shopped out white areas.

The next piece didn’t go as I had hoped. I started with a piece of rope wrapped fabric in green (more about that in a future post). I used three colors on the green background, which was an okay idea, but again the holes were too close. I’ve concluded that there needs to be more fabric and space between the holes.

  • black paint at edge
  • yellow paint on tip
  • flipped it and painted third color
  • back dry, not pressed
  • front dry, not presses.
  • front pressed, can’t really see the centers.

I did use the the above fabric but it doesn’t look anything like it did after painting. In my previous post I share the crackle/crinkle painted fabric and said I’d try to share an artwork using that technique and this newest paint technique. Here it is… Mixed media collage, raffia, coffee filter, and hand painted fabric. I may talk about the background wall fabric in a future post.

Untitled. Approximately 15.5″ x 11.5″

I learned more… One – I wanted the vase to be shiny so I painted Mod Podge on it, when it dried it was shiny BUT the crackles and crinkles were no longer visible. And two – Dry Mod Podge is really hard to wash out of fabric! I ended up flipping the fabric over and that worked fine, it’s actually darker than it appears in this photo.

After painting a few pieces I have more ideas for using this technique. If you paint fabric using any of these techniques I hope you’ll share your results.

Stay tuned for the next sweepstakes/giveaway announcement.

More Fabric Fun

Now that I have discovered typing single handed (for me) is slower that slow, I’m going to make this as short as possible. The fabric pieces I’m sharing here were done with one hand, I do believe with two functioning hands I would have gotten better results. Some times it’s just more about having fun!

As usual, the pieces may look different on each of our screens and in person. In keeping with my previous posts I made three additional Neocolor wax pastel exploration pieces. The purple piece is created the same way the gray wrinkled piece was. See the captions for some of what I did for each piece. Photos on the right are the dry and pressed flat pieces.

  • wrinkled
  • pressed dry (still a favorite!)
  • Rubbed pastel onto the plexi, into a flower shape with leaves and twisted at center points
  • This for sure would have been better twisted with two hands.

For the above – I colored plexi with blue wax pastel and then orange cross-hatch, laid wet fabric on top, gently smoothed, and left flat to dry. I was going for a plaid look but my daughter says it looks like reflections in the water – I agree and really like this finish.

For the landscape i drew a simple landscape on plexi and laid wet fabric on top, smoothing with my hand until all pastel met with the fabric. Pulled the bottom of the fabric to make some ripples and pulled some down from the top for clouds.

If you color any fabric with Neocolor II wax pastels, I’d love to hear/read about and see your artwork.