Waxing and Waning...

Happy July!!!

I've been getting a lot done on this large batik piece lately, in between of a busy farmers' market season. It's a good feeling to be able to get anything done art-wise when it's busy.

Anyway, I wanted to share  some photos of the recent progress.

This one shows a full shot of the piece with  the first dyed color waxed.

It might show up better in the detail photo next...

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In this detail, you can see I was waxing wherever I wanted to keep that pale greyish purple color.

So it's the lighter side of the tree forms, in a bark like pattern, as well as accents that hopefully will read as branches and the wonderful pattern of a pine woods.

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Then I dyed it in a darker tone of a purplish-grey.  The left shows the piece in the dye color, and the right shows the piece rinsed out.

Here is the piece with that second dye color already dried, and then waxed again to preserve that color.

I think the woods scene is really beginning to take shape!

Batik is such an exciting process. Even though I've done it for years, there's still an element of mystery to it. The layers of wax sort of obscure what's really going on...so even though I sort of know what to expect, you don't really know the details until that wax is removed.

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Here's a close-up of that area that's sort of in the top/right-ish area. You can see there's still some areas that are unwaxed.

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Here's a photo showing the piece getting rinsed in the third dye color. It's a light olive green (when wet it always looks so much darker!!!

I hung it up to dry out on the porch (photo to the right)

Here's the piece with that third color dried.

There's still more to go, but I'm getting there!

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Here is a photo showing where I've started to wax that green color to preserve it.


I've done the left half of the piece, and hopefully by the end of this week I'll finish waxing the rest of it and get it in it's final color....

Will let you know the progress on it soon!

:)

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