"Chromaticity", by Ptolemy Mann

If you've ever wondered about the appeal of dyeing yarn and weaving on a loom, here is a wordless two-minute video that celebrates the rhythms and visual pleasures of this ancient craft.

Eco-Dyeing: a Resource

As a subscriber to Fiber Art Now, I was delighted to access their complementary e-book on the exciting topic of eco-dyeing. Now I am sharing it with you!

Perfectly-timed with our anticipation of spring and more time spent outdoors, environmentally-friendly dyeing can be achieved using plant material and simple techniques. The book also includes inspiration and how-to on rust dyeing. Eco-dyeing can lead to fun projects with children (Easter eggs, perhaps?) to intriguing wearables, or to the most sophisticated of gallery installations. The approach can be used with papers as well as cloth.

The e-book is available here. Consider it a taster for what could well become an obsession.

Hand-dyeing linen

Needing to broaden the palette for my latest series, I started with some neutrals.

A satisfactory range of greys in hand-dyed, medium-weight linen

The most obvious neutral range is made with black dye, which produces a range of greys. I began with a depth-of-shade concentration of 8%, and then reduced it by half each time, to 4%, 2%, 1%, .5%, .25%, .125%, and .0625%. I should have begun with 10%, and that would have produced a stronger colour at each end, but nevertheless I'm satisfied with this range. It should prove to be useful in combination with other neutrals and as a foil to more vivid colours. A bit of a blue cast to the G&S Black dye.

Next, I did some experiments with golden yellow vs. lemon yellow, and black vs. navy. The navy produces a more green-green, but the black is more interesting and complex.

From left: 18 parts golden yellow: 1 part black (4% depth of shade)
18 golden yellow: 1 part navy (4% depth of shade)
18 lemon yellow: 1 part black (4% depth of shade)
18 lemon yellow: 1 part navy (4% depth of shade)

From left, 10 parts golden yellow: 1 part black (4% depth of shade)
10 parts golden yellow: 1 part navy (4% depth of shade)
10 parts golden yellow vs. 1 part black (2% depth of shade)
10 parts golden yellow: 1 part navy (2% depth of shade)

Finally, I wanted to create some interesting neutrals by mixing the complementary colours of orange and navy, and then orange and turquoise. When using pure-pigment MX dyes, these are the only complementaries available, because while there are a couple of reds, there is no pure green pigment. And while there are several yellows, there are no violets. Here are the results:

From left, 2 parts orange: 1 part navy (2% depth of shade)
5 parts orange: 1 part navy (2% depth of shade)
8 parts orange: 1 part navy (2% depth of shade)
2 parts orange: 1 part navy (5% depth of shade)
5 parts orange: 1 part navy (5% depth of shade)
8 parts orange: 1 part navy (5% depth of shade)
1 part orange: 1 part turquoise (2% depth of shade)
1 part orange : 1 part turquoise (5% depth of shade)

Note that I used extra-hot water when dyeing with turquoise. Also, observe how, with those last two, there is a real shift in hue, caused not by different proportions of pigment but by different intensities of pigment (depth of shade).

These colours produced by complementary pigments result in some very intriguing marbling, as seen below:

1 part orange: 1 part turquoise (2% depth of shade)

2 parts orange: 1 part navy (5% depth of shade)

An appealing complexity, no?

Adventures in Dyeing

It has been a month since I posted anything about my own work. I have been busy looking at art, but not so much making art. A January deadline looms, when I have committed to a solo show of large pieces.

As I have described to friends, I feel as though I have one foot on the dock and one foot in the boat. The boat is leaving and I have to commit to the boat or the dock. Do I make big collages on paper, or large abstract works with cloth and stitch? Either one will require a lot of prep.

Top row: hue gradation from tangerine to fuchsia to navy blue
Bottom row: hue gradation from strong orange to mixing red to grape

The collages will require me to make a good variety of large collage papers to work with. The art quilts will require me to dye large pieces of cloth in a range of colours.

About a year ago I ordered 30 yards of linen, in three different weights. I had been inspired by Colleen Heslin's work, shown last year at the McMichael Gallery in Kleinburg, Ontario, and thought working with linen would be a welcome change. Heslin works with hand-dyed linen, piecing shapes together with stitch, and stretching the work on supports, without quilting layers together.

And so I find myself in my studio, up to the elbows in dye buckets.

The linen is lovely to work with. It has a bit of a sheen, even when dyed. How the different weights of linen will work together, and whether they will pair up with hand-dyed cotton, remains to be seen.

Diane Franklin's "Dyeing Alchemy: An Interactive Workbook" is my go-to resource for dyeing recipes. Her method uses precise amounts of solutions (dye, salt, and soda ash) to allow you (in theory) to replicate past results. There is little waste of dye. Everything is weighed, including the fabric.

Mostly I work with the 14 unmixed dye powders available from Pro-Chem, plus black. I learned about these from Ann Johnston's Color by Accident. They are

• 108 sun yellow
• 114 lemon yellow
• 112 tangerine
• 104 golden yellow
• 202 strong orange
• 305 mixing red
• 308 fuchsia
• 802 boysenberry
• 801 grape
• 410 turquoise
• 406 intense blue
• 400 basic blue
• 402c mixing blue
• 414 deep navy.

All other dyes, including black, are blends of these basic colours. I do have some mixed dyes on hand from years past, and I sometimes reach for them, but I don't intend to replace them when they are used up.

On the Jacquard website is a helpful list of formulae for mixed colours, using of course their own brand names for the basic pigments.

Observations? 

1. When doing a range of intensities, there's not much difference between 1% and 2%, or 2% and 3%. So instead of doing a range of 1 - 2 - 3%, I'm better off doing a range of 0.5 - 2 - 5%.

2. If I happen to produce a couple of large pieces with very similar colours, it's a good idea to "over-dye" one of them with a different colour.

3. It's useful to keep notes.

Jane Davies colour class, Lesson #3

Analogous colour study, using 3 hues next to each other on the colour wheel:
magenta, red and orange, along with white to make the tints
plus some collaged bits of paper

This week in the on-line course "Unlocking the Secrets of Colour", we are exploring the wonderful world of colour theory. First, we used paint to produce tints and shades of colours. We did this by taking a single colour straight from the tube, and then adding increasing amounts of black paint to it (shades) and increasing amounts of white paint to it (tints). See results below.

It's always fun to see how adding black to yellow produces olive green. Black is a very powerful pigment and just the tiniest bit makes a difference, which is why most hand-dyers never run out of their first purchase of black dye powder. When dyeing shades, only a few grains of black dye are needed. When dyeing tints, the quantity of dye is reduced.

Then we moved on to create secondary colours from primaries.

Usually, yellow + blue = green, yellow + red = orange,
and blue + red = purple

Actually, the result depends on exactly which red or blue you choose as your "primary".  Ultramarine blue mixed with red will produce something quite different from cobalt or manganese blue mixed with the same red.  I can achieve this effect with cloth by doing gradient dyeing: changing the proportions of dye colours in the dye bath.

And how do we get muddy earth tones? By mixing complementary colours, from opposite sides of the colour wheel.  I especially like the ochres I can get by mixing yellow and violet. I can achieve this effect with cloth by "over-dyeing", or by gradient dyeing, as above.

Then Jane Davies suggested we make little compositions using various colour schemes. A monochromatic scheme relies on one colour straight from the tube along with black and white to create shades and tints.

Pure cadmium yellow light, along with its tints and shades.
I used some collaged bits from old magazines too, for texture.

An analogous scheme, like the one shown at the beginning of this post, uses two or three colours found side-by-side on the colour wheel. And finally, a complementary scheme uses two colours found opposite each other on the colour wheel. Below is my effort using the opposites of yellow and purple.

with a few bits of paper collaged into place.

While this theory is not new to me, it's always good to have another opportunity to explore colour. I'm especially enjoying the chance to make small compositions, just 5 x 7. Practicing putting together line and shape, dark and light, straight and curved, large and small, to make something interesting is time well spent.

The Greenwood Project, Take 2

When my text'art group saw the foreground I had created for my Greenwood project, they expressed concern about the direction it was taking. This resulted in a major re-think for me. I decided to proceed with the building itself, the upper half of the composition.

Greenwood gets the Cityscapes treatment

My technique includes tracing the working drawing onto HeatAway stabilizer, a transparent film, which then serves as a placement guide for the shapes I cut from cloth and fusible web.

The first shape goes onto the sky fabric.

In the photo above, you can see the first shape placed on the sky fabric, with the line drawing acting as a placement guide. When all the shapes are in position, the filmy stabilizer is set aside and a hot iron bonds the shapes to the sky background. Then the stabilizer is repositioned over the collage to serve as a stitching guide.

Building with foreground

Once the building was assembled, I was able to assess whether the foreground worked with the subject. As you can see, the foreground is overpowering the house. In retrospect, I should have completed the assembly of the house before beginning the foreground.

One suggestion (of many) made by my friends was to veil the foreground with coloured tulle to soften its impact. The tulle "knocked back" the foreground, but not enough. So...

A double layer of soft yellow tulle, pinned onto the right side

... back to the dye pots. I used olive, olive mixed with grey, and olive mixed with orange, to get lighter, more muted hues for the "garden" area.

Remember that cotton looks darker when it's wet.

I used the greyed-down colours to strip-piece layers. But the effect was still too strong.

Second foreground with more muted colours.

I decided to reduce the curving effect of the layers and eliminate the blue. Finally, on this third attempt, I felt the foreground was subordinate to the subject of the Greenwood house.

brown and blue eliminated, curves minimized

I was able to suggest the flagstone path, but otherwise tried to keep the transitions from one layer to the next very smooth.

Though at this point I was running low on printed fabric of a suitable colour, I had some cream-coloured cotton with text printed on it. I threw some of that into the dye vat to harmonize with the other layers. As well,  I stamped sepia paint onto green-dyed cotton to suggest script for another layer. My intention is that these fabrics will reference the layers of history in Greenwood's past.

I felt better after talking to some of the other artists participating in this project. Some of them have also been struggling, and admitted to two or three drafts before settling on a final approach.

Next instalment: adding a tree or two, stitching a line drawing on the house, quilting the foreground, and more. Watch this space!

The Greenwood Project, Take 1

Greenwood, as seen from
Main Road

I don't often take my inspiration from local architecture, but I am making an exception for a very special reason.

This year, my town of Hudson (pop. 5500 or so) celebrates its 150th anniversary. Local artist Daniel Gauthier has mobilized 14 artists to produce a series of canvases on the theme of Hudson. Each of us has been assigned an aspect of Hudson's history as the subject of a contemporary 40" x 30" painting. All will be displayed together this summer.

Greenwood, seen
from the water's edge.

I was pleased to learn that my commission is Greenwood, a heritage home that serves as a regional historical museum and as the home base of Storyfest, our local literary festival. My fascination with buildings led Daniel to choose this topic for me.

Greenwood is known for its beautiful lakefront garden, so I waited until the enchanting blue scilla carpeted the lawn before visiting the site. I prefer to portray architecture without a lot of foliage obscuring the lines of the house.

One of the challenges of the project is that all canvases must be vertically oriented. It wasn't difficult to settle on this photo, at right, one of thirty I took for source material.

Nickel (for the roof) and Hollandaise (for the walls)

I knew I wanted to stay true to the actual colours of the house, so my first task was to dye a pale, soft yellow for the building, and a grey-green for the roof.  My dye supplier suggested Hollandaise and Nickel, and that proved to be a good match.

I had a mottled blue and white fabric on hand for the sky.

strips of printed cottons
cut and ready for piecing

After much thought, I decided to use strips of printed, commercial fabric, together with hand-dyes, for the layers of grass, stone, scilla and scrub in the foreground. The technique of strip-piecing is one I used some years ago. I included some cotton printed with antique text to suggest the layers of history that Greenwood is built upon.

getting a feel for how
the colours work together

It was useful to have a mock-up of the colour palette on my design wall as the strip piecing progressed.

At right, you can see how the pieced foreground looks positioned against the sky background. The lines of the building are faintly visible, drawn onto a film of heat-soluble stabilizer that acts as a placement guide for the walls, windows and doors to be fused into place.

The project is challenging because of its size, the vertical format, and because I am combining a representational technique for the structure with an expressive approach to the foreground.

How will it evolve? Unexpectedly. Check out the next post for an update!

Snow Dyeing: The Saga

Last week our text'art group met to try our hands at snow dyeing. Materials required were dye solutions (1 - 3 teaspoons of dye per cup of water) mixed in a squirt bottle. Equipment included plastic trays, screening material, and clips or clothespegs to secure the screens to the trays. Also: snow! Before starting the activity, I read the instructions on the Pro Chem Dye website.

Here you can see Dianne preparing the fabric by pre-soaking it in a soda ash solution, 5 tbs soda ash to 8 cups of hot water. The cloth is wrung out and crumpled artfully on the screening, positioned above the tray. (Leftover soda ash solution may be saved and stored indefinitely.)

Above, Colleen builds up a 3-inch mound of snow on top of the cotton ...

... and drizzles dye solution generously on top of the snow.

Michele also arranged some prepared cotton underneath the screening, to catch any surplus dye solution.

The idea is to allow the snow to melt slowly, causing a random application of the various dyes over a long period of time, and allowing blended-pigment dyes to split into their components to produce serendipitous results. Eventually the trays were moved inside to promote the melting.

The results? Distinctly underwhelming.

For the piece above, I used four pure colours: strong orange, fuchsia, mixing red and boysenberry. Very little orange or boysenberry appeared. 

Bleh!

For these two, I used mixed-pigment dyes (pearl grey, safari grey, stormy grey, and blue violet.) The one on the bottom of the tray (below) was even more boring.

Ewww!

Not one to waste perfectly good PFD cotton, I ripped each of the three one-meter pieces in half and went back at it, using leftover dye solution. 

What was originally done with boysenberry / fuchsia / mixing red / strong orange was divided in two, with one half getting a generous dose of strong orange, and the other a good dousing of boysenberry. Much better results, shown below.

extra "strong orange" applied

extra boysenberry applied

One of the smaller bits done in greys was topped up with more blue-violet and black. 

Another with more of the greys plus nickel.

Another with all the leftover greys, which could make an interesting sky.

And finally some leftover chartreuse and the remaining blue-violet on this one.

first stage: three greys and blue-violet
second stage: chartreuse and more blue-violet

I'm happy with these and will definitely be using them in my work. 

Takeaway: don't approach snow dyeing with a light hand. Use more dye than you think you need and opt for mixed-pigment dyes to produce happy accidents. Consider using complementary colours rather than analogous for maximum impact.

Adventures in Dyeing

I've been having lots of fun mucking about with dyes. Below is a range that I achieved by using Strong Orange and Deep Navy. I chose these colours because Anne Johnston, in her Color By Accident, recommended them for producing interesting neutrals.

Strong Orange with increasing amounts of Deep Navy

Knowing that the navy would readily overwhelm the orange, as dark colours do, I began with a mix of 17 parts orange and 1 part navy, producing a warm brown. Gradually, I upped the proportion of navy to the point that I was using equal parts of orange and navy, which produced a dark charcoal.

With a weaker concentration of dye, the warm brown would translate into a sand beige, and the charcoal would become a neutral grey.

I learned from Anne Johnston that all commercially available dyes are either pure pigments, or a blend of pure pigments. She recommends that dyers acquire these 14 pure pigments and become familiar with the way they behave. So I chose pure pigments for this trial. Another time I might try the same experiment with Strong Orange and Mixing Blue.

Diane Franklin's Dyeing Alchemy referred me to a page on the Jacquard website, which gives recipes that use 11 basic pigments to create 71 mixed colours. I was immediately drawn to the recipe for chartreuse, which I have always found to be an interesting colour.  The Jacquard chart recommends 64 parts Lemon Yellow mixed with 1 part Medium Blue.  Isn't it surprising how such a tiny amount of dark dye can change the character of a light colour? (Jacquard's Lemon Yellow is the equivalent of Pro-Chem Sun Yellow and their Medium Blue matches Pro-Chem's Basic Blue.)

I found the result was a little "brighter" and "happier" than I wanted, so I tried again, substituting black dye for the Basic Blue, which gave a more "interesting" mix. You can see the two results below.

chartreuse, 64 g Sun Yellow : 1 g Basic Blue (on left) and
50 g Sun Yellow : 1 g Black (on right)

Finally, I was interested in the recipe for Periwinkle. I grew to love this colour as the result of one of our 12 by the dozen challenges. Jacquard recommends a mix of 9 parts Navy / 4 parts Fuchsia / 4 parts Cobalt Blue, one of the few recipes requiring three pure pigments. This translates to 9 parts Deep Navy / 4 parts Fuchsia / 4 parts Mixing Blue, using the Pro-Chem names.

value gradation of periwinkle

I made a gradation of values using this mix, producing some colours that I'm sure I will use in my work. The photo has washed out the colour of the lighter end of the range, so you will have to trust me on this: they are lovely. The starting solution was mixed to 6% depth of shade, which was too dark, and next time I would begin with a depth of shade set at 2 or 3%.