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Floral Summer Breeze depicts individual flower petals gently falling and forming new flowers, which then also fall and form clusters that gather like a flower garden. The silk painting was created on a crepe-back silk satin (charmeuse) fabric in May 2017 for a surface design class at Cornell University. The surface design for my fabric is mainly composed of silk painting as I can achieve desired lightness to darkness inside the flower using this medium. Additionally, my fabric includes block printing of sparkle shapes throughout my fabric to further depict the sheen of silk fabric. The confluence of flowers at the bottom give visual weight to the design toward the hemline.
My inspiration came from my own watercolor painting of a field of flowers, as shown at the top of this page. I chose to paint the field scene during a high school art class in April 2015. This watercolor painting won the Visual Arts Scholarship at my high school’s senior awards night. Looking at a photograph of purple fields in France, I had painted this on a 15” x 10 ½” watercolor canvas. The scholarship sponsors, Lazar & Colucci-Raymond James & Association and a local custom framing shop, framed and displayed my painting at the local Raymond James office for the following year.
The Process
On Photoshop, I created the floral pattern using the outline of many different flower petals and overlapping them. I split the fabric into three repeated sections and placed my fabric on top of the pattern and traced the outline with gutta, which resists dye to prevent its spread beyond the flowers.
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Block printing of a sparkle motif in silver paint
Rain-Kissed Tropical Night
As another project for my surface design class, I created a batik (wax-resist dyeing) on a cotton scarf with fiber-reactive dye. First, I layered wax onto the fabric in the area that I wanted to remain white. Then, I soaked the fabric in a light pink dye. Next I put wax on the areas that I wanted to be left light pink. I soaked the fabric in a pinkish-purple dye. Lastly, I put wax on the fabric in the places that I wanted to be left purple and soaked the fabric in a dark blue/purple dye. |