Blending Dye Techniques

I’d like to share two techniques I use to blend colours on my pysanky.

The first one is using a small paintbrush to work in small areas. On this egg I blended the yellow, orange and red. After writing my initial lines in white, I dipped the whole egg into the yellow (and will still do some more yellow work on this egg in other areas). Since I would like this flower to have a blended look… with a small, natural hair paintbrush, I painted in some of the orange, then when that dried, the red. Cover with wax, and continue in regular progression.

This is how they turned out on the final eggs

the other blending technique I employed on these eggs was the “dip” method, used to cover a much larger area. I needed the whole etched background to be filled in with a pink to purple gradation.

I dyed the whole egg Cream Soda Pink and let it dry.

Then holding the egg, dipped it halfway into the pink to re-wet so that the colours will blend in a smooth manner.

while the half of the egg is still wet with pink, dip just PARTIALLY into the purple… here I am using Viking Violet <3

I dipped this egg back and forth into the pink, then the violet a few times until I was happy with the blended result.

and here are the final two eggs using both the painted method and the dipped method… I think they turned out quite lovely!

this last photo shows this egg going through the dip method, and then notice how the previous colour, affected the next colour.

2nd Technique

I dipped this egg from the dry yellow into the green then the blue….. and then would draw my blended yellow –green-blue patterns… then when the whole egg goes into the pink, the underlying colours have affected the dyes… the yellow gives a brilliant pink, and the underlying blue gives it a purple tone.  I hope you try these methods on your next egg.

Gail Kozun-Bruckner Bio: Gail learned to write pysanka from her Mother. Growing up on the prairies in Saskatchewan has given her a love of nature and in particular birding. She is also a dancer and artist in other mediums as well.

Join Gail and other pysanka artists in the Ukrainian EggCessories' Eggers FB group by clicking and joining here: UKRAINIAN EGGCESSORIES' EGGERS