Recently I showed a friend a piece of printed fabric and told
her my plans for adding more layers. She gasped, “You’re
going to ruin it!” I admitted I might very well ruin it, but
I can always make a similar piece. I wasn’t worried. When
fi nished she agreed that the resulting layers were perfect.
Each new layer added subtle variations to the
fi nal piece.
After this success, I decided to add a second layer of sun
printing to a previously sun-printed leaf fabric. Since the
paint I frequently use is transparent, I wasn’t sure what
would happen when I painted over the entire piece a second
time. Would I lose all of the white in the fabric? Would the
second layer of leaves even show up? I was guessing, but I
decided to trust my instincts.
In spite of my uncertainly, the second layer of leaves in
my experiment was clearly visible. Although I only used
two colors of paint, the fabric now had four colors: fi rst
was the original white of the fabric, then the fi rst paint
color, the second paint color, and the combined color of
the two paints. As I experimented more, I found that as
long as I remembered to use the color wheel as my guide
for adding each layer, I was able to produce lovely multi-
colored results. My favorite combination is three layers with
a different color of paint for each layer. Using black as the
third layer also created some beautiful surprises.