Fingerpainting on Fabric

I was fortunate to have Parks Reese as my neighbor at the National Folk Festival. He is a Livingston, Montana artist who paints humorous images - often puns involving fish or other wildlife. You can visit his website here.

His mother, Ruth Faison Shaw, is known as the "First Lady of Fingerpainting". She used fingerpainting as a therapeutic technique and patented the formula for fingerpaint and the slick paper used with it. You can learn more about her at this website.

Anyway, Parks had quite a few original fingerpaintings for sale at the Folk Festival. Looking at his fingerpaints, I got a hankering to try to fingerpaint on fabric. After considerable thought, I decided my best bet would be to fingerpaint onto a gelatin plate and make a monoprint onto the fabric.

Here is my first attempt:

I used Pebeo Setacolor Transparent paints in full strength.
You can see the texture from the side of my hand and the swirls I made with my fingers in the detail shot below:

One of the greatest things about Gelatin Plate printing is the fact that you can get more than one print. Each subsequent print will be a little more faint, but that is interesting to look at and exciting to print. You don't really know what it will look like on the fabric so there is an element of surprise that can be addicting.

I was actually able to make 4 prints on fabric of this one - then did a 5th one on paper. Great backgrounds!