The art of making Batik is “meditation in action”. You have to be aware of your breath, focus your mind, as well as your body and be here now.
Batik is a traditional art form for patterning cloth to produce beautiful and varied effects. With origins in China, India, and Japan, the techniques of Batik were introduced to Java early in the last millenium at the time of the Chinese Tang Dynasty.
Batik is a technique to apply patterns of different colors to cloth by dyeing in several stages and by applying wax after each stage to protect areas of unwanted color.
Today we ventured to to try Batik painting with Ubud artist I Nyoman Suradnya and his son, Tuadi, and his apprentices. We took a four hour course on basic Batik painting. (Courses are offered that take up to five days. )
First you start with a plain white, cotton canvas. You are given a pencil and an eraser to start drawing an outline of your painting. Our teacher, David Patten, has become quite ill so I decided to paint a whale for him because it is his power animal.
Once you have sketched your outline, you take a special metal pen that holds hot wax and you dip it into a big kettle of wax that is bowling on a flame. You fill the ink reservoir with wax and then you use the wax to trace over your outline. Once you have traced over every penciled in line, you can begin to color in your work.
There are only a few primary colors available so you have to get creative to create other colors. (like yellow and blue make green) Then you can change the intensity of the color by adding water to your painting. The water softens the colors and makes them lighter.
First layer of paint
Once your colors are in, you coat the colors with wax to lock in the color. You can choose the regular wax or a special wax that creates a crackled effect on the color.
Here my picture is drying in the sun after applying the regular wax and crackle wax to all objects except background.
Here is my picture completely covered in wax.
After it is dry, you then use your hands to scrunch it up. The areas where the crackle wax is will create cracks in your painting. The painting is then put into a solution to treat the colors.
After the solution, the picture is washed with soap to remove any residues.
The painting is then boiled to remove all the wax.
Into a pot of boiling water
Once all the wax is boiled off, your Batik painting is complete!
My finished product!
