Opaque Paint on Fabric

I’ve been intrigued with using paint on fabric since my interest in the fiber arts began. The photo below shows a detail from Discovered, my first little art quilt. More info about it can be found on its page on my web site. In this case, the brown fabric on the right was painted with textile paints in various colors to create the outlines of the owl. Then most of the brown fabric was cut away and other fabrics were inserted from underneath. The sample below was painted using regular acrylics. They are somewhat stiffer than textile paints, but not to a degree that bothers me especially. I’ve tried using the Golden fabric medium (GAC 900) but can’t say whether it makes much difference. Guess a blind “touch test” would be the way to find out. Golden has a page with info about using their acrylics on fabric here.There’s something about the drybrush effect that lets the fabric show through that I love. This leaf sample was painted after being quilted. This detail from a sunflower study shows that most of the outlining got covered up by the fabric pieces. The silver paint in the sky was lightly applied with a fine-textured sponge after quilting. The detail below shows an in-progress piece that is just acrylic paint on a background fabric at the moment. The plum color on the right shows the background color. The idea was to get at least some paint on the whole surface, then add pieces of fabric, then stitch away. It’s pretty huge though, so who knows when there’ll be time to work on it. (I have two book deadlines coming up this summer, that’s the hold-up.) This is a follow up piece to this study. You can see my progression here, from using a small amount of paint to an allover approach. We’ll see how much gets covered up when the fabric collage phase begins(!)