Handling the unexpected aka the challenge part of a challenge

Today I went in and quickly cleared the area in front of the sink before lunch.  As I got closer to the wall, I discovered that it is a bad idea to lean a big piece of plastic against the wall and then close up the basically unheated room for a few weeks while there's company visiting.  Condensation, closed space, well, not nice.  After a vigorous scrub with alcohol, and the beginning of some serious sneezing due to my mold/mildew allergy, I realized I was going to have to revise my expectations for my day.  So, I made lemonade.  I grabbed some of the fabric, a box of the paints, my favorite brushes, and the padded board I like to work on with silkscreening, moved the UV light air filter fan into the studio and closed the door.    Resulting in this folding table with a view of the backyard bird feeders.

minimal workspace with a view

Then I broke for some allergy meds and lunch.  This meant a late start on the silkscreening and painting but at least I was still making progress.  I started with the t-shirt and discovered that the Setacolor shimmer colors lose most of the shimmer when dry brushed on lightly.  I decided to switch to another fabric for trying out the paints.

tshirt with orange & gold on big dragonfly

Since I have a request for the dragonflies on dark fabric, I decided to see which dragonflies worked best on the dark fabric with the various metallic silkscreen paints I had in my box.  Here's the result with the medium size dragonfly from the t-shirt.  On the t-shirt, this was done with a non-metallic paint.  Here, I used silver on the top 2, red and gold on the middle 2, and the bottom was peach and bronze.  This dragonfly has very thin lines and doesn't work very well with the metallics.  Altho, looking at the picture now, I can think of times I might want the almost ghost image of the dragonfly that the bottom pair turned out to be.

thin lines

The final tryout repeated the darker fabric with a larger dragonfly and the 3 most successful colors from the one above:  red, gold and silver.  Looking good! Crisp lines and good paint density from the silkscreens.

Ready to paint

Results from today:  I wrote on the folder for the medium dragonfly to not use it with metallics.  Way too iffy on the results.  And I got out the transparent medium and the Speedball pearlescent base to see if I can get the slightly glittery translucent tone I am looking for with the painting.  I also ordered some mold/mildew remover/sealant which should come sometime tomorrow.  That means tomorrow  I will be continuing to work on the folding table and my goal is to paint all the dragonflies I screened today.  If I get all that done and still have work time, I'll start working on sketches of dragons.