I'm going to be straddling themes this week. Below you will find a Kintarou image I dyed using a range of natural dyes, and also an image of two children at
play done entirely in natural pigments.
Kintarou at Play in the Forest
This is rather a large piece, 44″ x 36″, the central image of Kintarou took two sheets of stencil paper to create. The
image of Kintarou, along with the bear and the monkey were dyed first with the
paste applied to white silk Shantung from Exotic Silks. The browns you see as
the tanned body of the boy, along with bottom, feet, hands, and face of the
monkey, were all done with iron rust and soymilk. The deeper shadings are a
combination of the same rust with cocheneal pigment added. The bear is dyed
primarily with burnt umber, and the blacks you see are all soot from my
fireplace. Kintarou’s
harakake is dyed with indigo and barberry (Ryrica rubra Sieb, aka, shibuki 渋木).
Once Kintaroo and company were allowed to cure for a period, they were covered
with a layer of rice paste to protect them during the following steps: The
background was sized with soymilk to help the silk take the dyes and protect
the silk from the mordant. It was then brushed several times with a combination
of barberry and chrome (the mordant).
Detail of Kintarou Silk–notice how the first application of paste kept some parts of the silk white.
I use very minute quantities of mordants, and normally add them to the dye so
that the mixture may be applied to the silk all in one step. The main
advantages to this approach is a reduction in the amount of mordant needed, and
knowing exactly what color I will wind up with before it is applied. So, unlike
traditional western dyeing, the mordant is not being used to fix the dye (the
soymilk takes care of that task) but instead to simply point the color of the
barberry in a certain direction, in this case golden brown.
Over this golden-brown barberry I applied more rice paste to create the images
of the pine trees in the background. Once dry, I built up more layers of
indigo, cocheneal, and barberry (this time with alum added) to create the
variations in color you see.
After two months of curing, I washed out all the paste, dumped the wash water in
the garden (the mordants are completely bound up in the cloth), pulled out the
steam iron to take care of the wrinkles, and you can see the results above!
I buy my barberry in large bricks of concentrated extract that break apart into
shiny tar-like chunks.
Boy and Girl Playing Jan Ken Po (Scissor Paper Stone)
Jan Ken Po is a game found world wide in one form or another, known in English as Scissor
Paper Stone.
The image has been dyed on heavy-weight Shantung silk. The design for the two
was first sketched in blue flower (aobana 青花), a disappearing dye made from flower petals (Commelina communis). Unlike most
of my work, rice paste was not used to create the image of the boy and the
girl. They were hand-painted. Once the natural dyes were cured, they, just like
Kintarou above, were covered in rice paste as a protective layer. The
background was dyed a pale indigo. It is only at this point that I pulled out a
stencil, the maple leaf, and used it to create background patterning with
paste.
22″ x 32″ All of the dyes used are natural pigments; including indigo, ocher, vermillion,
cocheneal, and soot.
