Little Mountains

Small molehills in my art seem to become little mountains.  The focus of my art, many times, is keeping them small, rather than allowing them to grown into large peaks.  Yesterday was a day of learning.  As I had mentioned, I have never silk painted before, but I have a vision of what I want, and I have a center element that is quite detailed.  I had purchased applicator bottles with three different tips, the smallest of which was 0.5mm to apply the resist.  As it turns out - 0.5mm is quite thick when it comes to resist.  NOT good.  I had spent 45 minutes drawing my tree onto my silk, and it took less than 5 minutes with the applicator to realize that it was too broad a stroke.  I knew I had smaller needle-point tips at the shop; I use these for application of resins.  So in mid-day, I went to the shop and collected my needle-tips.  I had to rewash my silk, dry it and retrace my image so that it was darker and easier to follow.  I tested the smallest needle tip before I threw the silk into the wash and it is much thinner.  I may still need to apply some of this with a brush to be super accurate, but I think this will work. 

Unfortunately, I didn't have a chance to get to this step.  I had to settle down and do some work.  I promised a customer that I would scan the opaque 14o/15o hex beads that I had available for her to purchase.  There are 66 of them, and I got almost half of them scanned in yesterday.  I'll continue working on these over the next few days and then get them onto my shop's website (www.beadstorm.com) so that she can look over the colors with ease.  It really is an amazing amount of work to do this, but it will be nice to get some more product up on the store website.  All in all, it was a productive studio day, even though I didn't accomplish  what I needed to get done.  I'll just have to be more focused over the next few days.