Experiment

I am not a painter. I don't even do well when painting walls in my home, and to try to paint something with a steady hand and a good eye, I just don't do well with it.

But I have these wonderful media that I've wanted to try, and so I did a little experiment in comparing neocolor water soluble crayons and water soluble oil pastels as well as the tool that I used to apply the colors.

I started out with this photo of a stargazer lily:

And then I traced the flower on to pfd cotton sateen. For the first test, I applied the crayons to the fabric using a q-tip. The results, pretty, but not at all satisfactory for painting the lily--way way way too much bleeding:

On the next try, I applied the neocolor crayons with qtips again, but this time I squeezed out the excess water. Better result, but still not what I wanted to do, not enough control:

For the next one, I used the neocolor crayons with fantastix (the "brushes") that come with tsukineko ink. It was much better:

But I decided to keep on going. On the fourth try I used the tsukineko ink with the fantastix. It was too "inky" and not enough "water colory" for my taste. And I couldn't get a very smooth texture:

 And finally, I used the oil pastels and applied them with the fantastix and we have a winner, ladies and gentlemen!

This one did not bleed much at all and blended the best. So now it's become:

I also used the pastels on the background of the fabric--4 colors of blue  and a purple. But then, the flower looked flat and boring. So I quilted lots and lots of leaf shapes on the backgroun and filled in a few with more thread. Now all that's left is the binding. I hope to teach a class using this sample at some point in the near future.

Until next time . . . .