 Hello there. I'm Sandy Almak and today I'm going to show you how to do a Copic painting on silk fabric that's on a frame. It's a really cool accidental technique discovery. I am one of those weird people that buys things thinking, oh yeah, I'll use that someday. And I've had these silk hoops for a long time and I haven't tried them. But I finally decided to give it a shot because they've been staring at me for a long time. I bought a card and I bought them at a local store but you could get them online as well. So there have been links to the supplies in the doobly-doo. They're real inexpensive. They come in a three pack and I did a test one. This was my first try and it was kind of, I mean it was alright but it was not what I was looking for. I ended up using some direct re-inker on it, like just dripping things in it. That's how I got that center of the flower. And I got weird blobbies in the background. I was trying to figure out how to make like a bokeh thing and that didn't work. There's lots of things that didn't work here. But it had enough promise that I decided to sacrifice another of these hoops to trying it again. Then I turned the camera on for the second one. But I was going to avoid some of the mistakes that I'd made in the first one in the second try. So the way that I began was by transferring a sketch. I did a sketch of a sunflower and I was going to offset it on the side of the hoop on the side of the circle. And then I was going to do something out there in the distance. I didn't quite know what but my flower was going to be just kind of surging in from the side of the frame. And I've sketched it on a piece of paper and then I could just trace it because it's silk fabric so of course you can see through it. I used a light marker to sketch all the areas in there with the sunflower portion and then switch to the colors for each of the sections that were going to need another color so I didn't have yellow in them. Not necessarily a really important thing in this because it's pretty easy to push color around on this. I was amazed at how easy it was to just move it. It was not expected at all. So here I am putting the center of the flower in the disc that has these kind of spiral florets that I talked about in Monday's video if you missed that one on how to draw a sunflower you can check out my last video and learn how to draw sunflowers and then for the greens I just added in some green. Now I didn't want to lay this down on the surface of the table itself because I think that was part of my issue. I had laid the whole frame flat on the surface for the first one and especially when I started adding like pouring liquid straight on it I got a lot of the color hitting the paper and then coming back up just soaking back up into the silk and it also looked much darker when it's right on the surface of the paper rather than getting any of that light under it. The package from Jacquard says that you're supposed to hang this in the window and let the sun come through it and you don't get any of that look when you have it laying flat on the surface. So I used a couple of rolls of tape to lift it up. I should have used three. It would have been more stable to make a tripod out of it but I ended up holding it a little bit with one hand. I did find as I said that the color goes on nicely. There's no resistance like you can feel when you're coloring on paper you feel the resistance. Your hand is pushing the pen and here I was not pushing at all. It was just like butter. It was really really nice. So if you're interested in trying a different surface for doing coloring on this is a wonderful one. You can do something representational but you can also just do random shapes and it would be wonderful on this. I just I can see so many ideas for it and I've actually ordered another couple packs of these because I'm going to play with them some more and make more of these and start to I don't know figure out where I could go with it. I originally bought these because I wanted to do some water color on it because you know that says something on it about painting and you can paint with acrylics on them. I've seen people do things where they combine water color or other other mediums on fabric and then sew on it and I was thinking of doing something where I could have some stitching on top of it since it's on a hoop and it's fabric like I don't stitch much but that would be kind of a cool thing to add and you know find some areas that would work for textures. I don't know if you've got ideas put those in the comment section. I would love to get more ideas since I bought a bunch of these and they're on the way to my house. I don't know when or if I will do another video with it but it was really cool to play with. Nevertheless, I was trying to figure out what to do with this background because I wasn't really sure after my first attempt to try to make it look like a field and then it didn't and when I have a photograph which I was looking at for I had a couple different pictures I combined to make this drawing it was all fields just lots and lots of greens and I wanted to have something out there that felt like there was motion. In last week's Friday video if you've seen that one if you haven't go watch it because it talks about motion a lot and that's what I was trying to achieve here but instead of using the cross shape that I did in that one I wanted to radiate out from the center of the flower. I just have that burst of motion coming from the flower since the angle of the flower is a side view anyway and it's got all those petals radiating out why not do that for the rest of the drawing so I was playing around then with thinking what kinds of shapes what kinds of colors I opted for green that was kind of a I don't know it felt like a cheater choice I was debating whether to go rainbow and decided that I was this was too new to me so I was going to try something that I thought I could control which was greens just using a lot of different types of greens together and that gave me places to play just playing with the cools and the warms and the darks and the lights and that sort of thing and just making graphical shapes that would feel like leaves but would be more in terms of abstract than it would be in trying to represent a field of sunflowers more literally I was trying different greens together some of them got really dark at the base of the flower itself which really made that yellow pop nicely so then I had to go back into everything else and start adding more of the darks in the rest of it and it was a good experiment to see how much layering I really could do how dark could I get it you can see the edge of the fabric is glued onto the frame itself that was probably the one thing that I'm not thrilled with about this and I think I probably come up with a solution for it which is that the way they finish this they glue the fabric onto the hoop itself and then they just kind of lop it off and there's some areas where it's lopped off and kind of hangs out there it's just strings hanging out or the ends of the fabric like it somehow needs to be finished better and I don't know what that is if you've got any ideas please do let me know because I don't do this kind of a thing very often I have no idea what I'm talking about when it's fabric and how to handle that I'm also going to see if maybe they make frames that are rounded of some kind even though the package says that you're supposed to hang this in the window and let the sun come through Copic marker is not light safe and if it's not light safe not really sure I want to hang it in the window I also since this is just an experiment I thought some of you might like to see it if you're interested in purchasing it I am going to put it in my shop so you can see that one I'm gonna also put the other one in there because I know even though I'm not happy with it somebody else will love it so if you want to do that if you run the experiment of hanging it in the window and tell me if it starts to lighten then let me know because I'm curious and I you know I'm gonna offer these up if anybody would like them and if not I'm gonna hang it in my own window Monday's video by the way if you missed it was drawing this sunflower and you can go see that one and learn how to draw your own sunflower and get a whole bunch of free downloadables you can color in your own sunflower mine and a whole bunch of others there's also a flower class that I talk about in that video so go check all that out and I will see you next week and I bet you can't guess what the theme is for next week if you do guess then I will send you a card in the mail so place your guesses in the comments I'll see you next week