Gourd Batik Secrets

The year was 1989. I was at a street faire. One of the vendors was selling her gourd work. She was generous in sharing about her techniques. She used leather dyes and hardened muds on gourds. I bought one which I still have today. I used it as a pattern or inspiration. If imitation was a form of flattery, she was beloved. I developed techniques of my own that approximated her craft form and then when on to create my own style.

One thing that did not change was my appreciation for leather dyes. They flow like watercolors or glaze on pottery. They are translucent so markings of the gourd show through. They blend together and push other colors to the edges. As long as I was content to do gourd craft that was reminiscent of glazed pottery my method worked fine.

Eventually I wanted to change up my technique and create art with a different flare. Even though I didn't consider myself an artist who could draw something a stranger could recognize I tried more traditional art subjects like flowers using other mediums such as acrylics, oils, watercolors, colored pencils. They all looked like something I would have brought home from preschool for the refrigerator.

Nothing had the luminescence of leather dyes. Leather dyes had 2 unfortunate qualities. 1. They fade. They don't just fade a little, they fade a lot. 2. They run together and spread out over the surface of the gourd. A petal looks like a blob.

I was enamored of a medium, leather dye, that I couldn't control. I tried various brands of leather dye and added vinegar to the dyes to make them more fade resistant but alas. The best dyes are Angelus brand but they still fade.

For some reason, that first gourd I bought has not faded. Of course I have not displayed it in direct or indirect sunlight. Maybe she knew I secret I have yet to discover. But now I was a woman on a mission with problems to solve.

The problem of fading was so vexing I stopped working with gourds for a couple of years. But I couldn't get them out of my bloodstream. The last couple years I have spent at least $1000 trying new products. I had test strips all over the house but especially in the garden windows where they would get megadoses of sunlight.

The GourdMaster products are colorfast but they do not flow like leather dyes. They are not translucent. You need a heat gun to dry the medium. It did stay where I put it. It comes in luscious colors. I especially like them for putting a base coat on a gourd if I don't want the transparency.

India Inks have potential. I could thin them with water to make them more translucent. If there is not too much ink on my brush the ink stays where I put it. If I add enough water I can push it to flow, sort of. It seems to be holding their color well. The colors mix beautifully to provide an extensive palette with few colors. A little goes a long way.

Black India ink definitely made it to my list of must use products as you will soon see. When covering a whole surface it goes on smoothly and there are no brush strokes!

I did not find uses for watercolors, whether they came in tubes, bricks or liquid. Some of the scrap booking products had potential, especially the alcohol based inks. These are both fade resistant and flow like leather dyes.

One of the main considerations is that every medium is going onto a tan to brown surface instead of the standard white surface so the colors are greatly modified in the semitransparent and transparent colors. Yellows and whites are especially hard to convey in every semitransparent medium I tried.

I recommend using Gourd scraps to make a color palette so you know your potential color range on a gourd. I also know people who whitewash their gourds just to get the vibrant colors. To me that nearly defeats the purpose of working with a gourd as a 3 dimensional canvas but it is an option.