First 2 painted dragonflies are done

Progress today was good but not what I expected to be working on.  I finished silkscreening the fabric I had already sized and pressed.  I got one test of Setacolor shimmer vs transparent paint done.  Since I'm still reacting to the studio air, and I didn't have the painting supplies to make other test, I spent the rest of my work time today watching a class on Skillshare (Mastering Inking).  I hope this will be relevant when I get to working on the dragon drawing.

For tomorrow, I have *lots* of silkscreened dragonflies in various colors to do the paint experiments with.

all screened with metallic paint

The little paper plate above is what I used as a palette for the mixing of transparent Setacolor with matte medium.  I did this to increase the transparency of the paint.  The big gold/green blob on the plate is watercolor gold mica mixed with thinned medium and textile medium.  I used those paints on the smaller dragonfly.  The bigger dragonfly was painted with the Setacolor shimmer opaque fabric paints.

transparent vs opaque fabric paints

The painting lessons learned for today are:  1) even with a teeny brush the opaque paints are more time consuming to use if I want to keep the silkscreened lines.  2)  the shimmer doesn't really show so probably not worth the time/effort to use the opaque paints.  3) the transparent paints work great with a larger brush and go on quickly & easily while still showing the silkscreen lines well except for the tip of the tail where I used a blue that was too close to the blue of the lines.

Looking forward to some extended painting tomorrow alternating with some more info about brushes, inks and brush strokes from Skillshare.