Description
Royal Gramma, Original Silk Painting
The royal gramma, also known as the fairy basslet, is a species of fish in the family Grammatidae native to reef environments of the tropical western Atlantic Ocean. I enjoyed zooming in on the detail of this fantastic creature. The brilliant colours of tropical fish are just made for silk painting and painting this filled me with joy.
My paintings are mainly painted on pure Chinese habotai 8 silk with specialist silk paints. I start each work with a drawing on paper and then trace the image onto a piece of white silk stretched onto a wooden frame. I then apply a special paint called gutta, which contains natural latex called gutta-percha, over my traced lines. This creates a resistive barrier through which the coloured ink will not flow. I apply the coloured ink with a brush and use salt dropped into the ink whilst wet to created textured effects.
The finished painting is removed from the wooden frame, ironed to fix the colour in the fabric and stretched onto acid-free mountboard ready for framing.
You can see a time lapse video of me painting here.
The original painting will come mounted to fit a 20 x 20 cm frame. The actual image size is 13.5 x 13.5 cm. Frame is not included.
