When I was a little girl, my father used to match inks for a living.
Back in the days before process-printing (where all colors come from the overprinting of between four and eight mostly-transparent inks) was king, a lot of color printing was done color by color, using inks formulated from the same pigments used by artists. It was Dad's job to look at the colors of original artwork and determine what combinations of pigments would be needed to match each color exactly. There could be some variation in the mixture depending on both ambient and processing conditions (heat, humidity, pressure), but the result had to be the same. Each color for each project had notes, in case a second print run was needed, so that the colors of the new printing would exactly match those of the old printing.
That sort of work required knowledge of pigment materials and colors, some knowledge of chemistry, and a very keen eye for color — which he did his best to pass on to me. For most of my life, though, my internalization of color has been relative, not pigment-based. It wasn't until I started working at Michaels that my childhood memories of pigments came back to me.
Today, a number of paint manufacturers sell products with the old pigment names followed by the word "hue" — for example, Alazarin Crimson Hue. As opposed to the HSB digital colorspace (where "hue" refers to redness, blueness, etc.), "hue" in a pigment name means that the color was manufactured to come as close as possible to that of the original pigment, but either avoiding toxic materials, or at a cheaper price point, or both. (While there are differences in the behaviors of real and "hue" pigments, I also remember Dad telling me how many of his colleagues died in their thirties because of exposure to those chemicals.)
My first new "paint" acquisition for the Great Fabric Medium Experiment was Liquitex Professional Acrylic Ink in Cadmium Yellow Light Hue. I've been wanting to play with artist acrylic ink since finding out that Speedball non-black calligraphy inks are acrylic-based, and I can apparently use these inks in dip pens as well as with brushes. I chose the yellow because it was bright and light; I wanted something that should show up on both a dark shirt and a white shirt. What I didn't know is that Liquitex Cadmium Yellow Light Hue Ink is a transparent (see-through) color, meaning that some of the color of the medium (or underlying paint layers) will show through. A dropper full of well-shaken ink all but disappeared into the red shirt scrap I'd been using for small-scale testing for my Michaels app T-shirt. [I warned you I can't resist playing with new toys!] I learned from Golden's web site that transparent pigments are better for mixing and blending than opaque pigments. Both Liquitex and Golden publish charts that rate their color products for transparency, lightfastness, and permanence.
Another issue I'd run into in my recent T-shirt projects was bleeding. Basically, the thinner a fluid, the further a drop of it will spread — and the more absorbent the surface it is dropped upon, the more it will seep into the surface (rather than rest on top of it). This is one of the reasons that artists cover their canvases with gesso (and let it dry) before putting paint to canvas. (Note: prepared canvases, like the stretched canvases we sell over at Michaels, have already been primed with gesso and are paint-ready.) Acrylic paints in general, and craft paints in particular, are usually thinned with water to create the correct consistency for their intended use. If a paint has settled and has not been sufficiently shaken up, or if a paint has been thinned too much for the surface, it will either run (drip down an upright or angled surface) or bleed (absorb into the surface and spread beyond the borders of the brush stroke). One way to stop bleeding is to set a boundary beyond which the paint (or dye) is not allowed to spread. This boundary is called a resist.
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| The dark halos around the lighter paint patches indicate bleeding. The light halo around the paint patch on the right is where the paint has encountered a test resist. |
While I don't have a formal experiment planned for testing those two fluids as resist mediums, I might just add a couple of test patches along the way.
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