One Giant Batik ! ( 2 colour )

well fine, for some of you this may not be GIANT but its the biggest piece i’ve ever done …. its exactly a meter in breadth and about 44 inches in length if my memory serves me right . In this particular one i have taken  Khadi  cotton cloth and dyed it in two colours, yellow and then black, using napthol dyes . hopefully bigger and better ones to come !!!

i love donkeys, and i love the beach, and well, if you ask my why i chose to do a donkey above a cluster of shells, i could go in to quite a bit of explaining. And for once i don’t really feel like explaining my work, feel free to derive you own reason as to why there is a donkey and shells

A Crab hee he

Detailed view

 

When Nafisa came to town !!! :)

Recently a friend of mine from college came down to Cochin to help me out with work, we did everything from my regular shibori silk dyeing, to batik to bringing down my table loom that sadly we never found the time to set up (much to my fathers disappointment ) plus a lot of little experiments in between sooo even though this entry does not consist of work as such, thought id share the experiance!!

1)Nafisa Waxing her poncho 2) finished waxed poncho

oh and thats my studio !!!! there will shortly be a huge mural and the wall you see there… anyone wants to help out is always welcome, brushes and paint provided

dont you just want to dive into this snap???? bliss !!

Shibori and Batik - intitial stages

Rays cutting through millions of tinted glass pieces... lamp love.

this was taken on our visit to jew street, fort kochi. there were scores of snaps taken but cant put them all up here… all in all a brilliant brilliant time !!! loved every min of it !!! as for the work done, stay tuned, will be posting that seperatly ciao !

 

finally some new batik exploration!

i have been wanting to start batik for months now, trying to get together all my supplies and chemicals. not to mention waiting for my small work space to get set up, now, finally, its all sort of taken shape sooo i actually began some simple explorations the other day and i was so excited with how they came out i just had to come and put them up…. so here they are, i plan to do a lot more pieces, with more variations and a lot of exploration. but for a start i think im doing ok….. trying to get a feel of the dyes …. you have to be so careful when dealing with naphthols ! ok enough typing …. on to the work !!!

piece 1

piece 2

in the above two pieces i began by exploring the tools i had. and also i tried out the dyes for the first time. mostly i was looking at thick/thin lines, brush strokes, how to get fluid lines, the effects i can achieve etc etc.

piece 3

piece 4

in these two pieces i experimented with naphthol dyes and vat dyes…. the blue/green fishy piece is done using vat dyes, and the leaf is done using naphthols.

piece 5

piece 6

if theres one thing i love its faces and expressions. so before i knew what i was doing i ended up doing these two…

 

BAtik Factory in lanka

hi everyone, its been a really busy month and i must admit i have been ignoring my blog just a little bit, but im back and first let me start off by sharing some pics of my amazing experiance at a batik factory in Sri Lanka which is where i was for a little less than a month. i was really lucky to get the oppertunity to work with some amazing woman who have been doing batik for over 35 years. even got to do some small pieces myself.

step by step process

Some pictures from the Factory

drawing out the design

marie akka at work

my magical tools

the pot o wax

Marie akka teaching me how to make a batik pen

cloth to be dyed

the various baths needed to dye one piece of cloth

removing the wax

 

Trying my hand at batiks

For those of you who are not familiar with what exactly batik is, its a method of using wax as a resist on cloth to form patterns. ok wait ill give you a better definition……
[Batik – a method of dyeing cloth which involves the use of wax to resist dye. Wax is applied to parts of the design where the color of a dye is not desired.] if you want to know more, google it .