painting & image transfer onto cotton

Recently, I'd acquired some goodies to experiment with: large piece of unbleached cotton fabric, Martha Stewart's Fabric Medium & TAP transfer papers. For the first image, I played around with gelli printing onto swatches of the cotton which I'd ripped to equal sizes (a little bigger than 5 x 7 inches). To make sure the paint stays, I mixed in a little of the fabric medium with the acrylic paint directly on the gelli plate. We'll see how they hold up in the wash!

For the image with the two blue swatches, I found a tutorial showing how to paint with acrylics onto fabric in a way that they resemble watercolors rather than acrylics. I love this! Obviously, I used more water than paint, and I wet the fabric/rang it out beforehand so that when the paint was applied, the watered down fabric would help produce a more watercolor-y effect. I have a few ideas into how I'd like to use these in the future....maybe as a fabric book with some image transfers overlayed. The possibilities are endless!

The last image is an image transfer I did using one of my photographs from Ano Nuevo state park and TAP transfer paper. This paper is amazing and by far my favorite image transfer method so far. You can transfer imagery to metal, wood, fabric, etc. It's not cheap, so when I get it, I use sparingly and only when I have a clear vision of what I want to use it for.