I had come to paint on silk after several years working as an artist, painting, drawing, printing, sculpting and other disciplines. I had worked with dyes, fabrics and painting other ways, when I bought a 5 page brochure on Gutta for about a dollar from the old Pearl Paint in Central Square, Cambridge. I paid a dollar thinking it looked as if someone had hand collated the brochure and I figured it was going to buy granola for some starving artist likely living in the back of her boyfriend's VW bus. I remember nothing in that brochure was anything I hadn't figured out by reading the label of the then-available resists. I preferred a few other ways of stretching silk than what it prescribed. Piecemeal, ever since, I have compared my knowledge with various books and artists.
So,... I will start off my list of tricky dyes with Sennelier's Absinthe. I simply could not get it to fix! It turned light chartreuse. What a mess! Note that when dyes are known to fail to fix well, it is often recommended that you add salt to the dye, fully dissovling the salt before painting with the dye.
Black- is never black. Two floods and cross your fingers, at least. Maybe thickener would help.
Next, about mislabeling products by Deka. There was a stand in an art supply store with tiny bottles of Gutta on it, from the Deka company. On these tiny, little bottles were even tinier print that explained how to remove gutta, the usual blah, blah, blah, even on the BLACK GUTTA, indirectly one could have reasonably inferred from the instructions that the colored gutta would not be able to be removed OR that it WOULD.
I understand Deka is going out of business.
Now, to the best of my knowledge, advances in the 1980's in the science of chaos enabled scientists to break up clumps into extremely fine pigments, and I always figured that fact would catch up with fine art products. I can't see why guttas could not be dyes, anyways. ...suffice to say, I had another thing in mind when I painted the picture than what turned out. The customer happened to be pleased, though, so what's my complaint?
Tinfix: I get the same comment on Tinfix, over and over again! In the 80's it was an entirely different product. Nowadays, it is so weak that it requires overpainting, which is very dangerous. Too many painters have emailed and spoken of this to me. Is the Tinfix company afraid of becoming like Chrysler? Will they go out of business if their product is too good? Have they turned a blind eye on aesthetics? But it still beats anything else on the market, so nevermind.
After so many experiences and reports of others' experiences with bad batches of gutta, (doesn't wash out, doesn't hold the line, comes in globs instead of flowing) AND realizing the chemical unlikelihood of gutta being water soluble like I want it- stable enough to use and unstable enough to break down when I want it to, I ventured out to Pro Chem's potato starch resist. Presist. Of course it was easier to use, but it needed a wider nib to push through. Ow, my hand! It was far more brittle, so I couldn't draft ten paintings and let them hang for a month on my rack before I painted them in. The potato starch would not hold up, and it was brittle like a sugar coat. It held up to gentle painting fine and well enough. It held up and it washed out like a CHARM! I love it, now, consider it so much easier to use. It lowers te cost of production because it's so much easier to wash out.
...More to come. Email me if you have recommendations, please. We would like to update this page frequently.
Points:
Painting on silk, I have noticed that some dyes take longer to fix than others. On one silk piece I created, the strongest color near completely washed out with the gutta after hours of cautious steaming. This is a terrible disappointment, & even though collectors have asked to purchase the piece since it hanged in my home, I refused because the result is a substandard work. I'm sure many silk painters have had mistakes they never forget. Hence, I will here create a table of dyes and ratings or notes on peculiarities of products or mislabeling.
Perhaps the manufacturer will have answers, too, for posted problems. Below is an enhanced (I gave some intensity to the culprit absynthe dye) photo of the forementioned painting.
