Silk Underwear
Yes, all my pieces of artwork wear underwear! Shall we take a peek?
When a piece is finished I take it out of the hoop and stretch it over a piece of acid-free foam core, which is a yellowish white. However, silk already has a yellowish tinge which I usually don’t want to accentuate and the kind I use at 10 momme is quite see-through. The choice of background colour can therefore make a big difference.
So, I put a place a sheet of acid-free paper between silk and foam core, usually “Arctic” by Strathmore Artist Papers, a very white white. In underwear terms, this would be your classic white cotton. 
In this picture you may be able to tell a very subtle difference between the left half (with white paper) and the right half (foam core only). It may be easier to see in low light. The camera doesn’t pick it up too well but it makes a noticeable difference to the finished work.
Sometimes I want to darken the colour of the silk, say for a night scene. This is where your racy black undies, as it were, come into play in the form of black or some other dark shade of paper.
And some pieces apparently call for a custom-designed garment complete with satin ribbons and bits of fringing! At least, that’s what’s going on with my latest.
This is white paper with lengths of pink, cream and blue ribbon or unpainted silk glued on (and some areas deliberately left white) meant to depict reflections on the water. I sometimes frayed one or both sides of the ribbon or silk pieces to help make the colours look more graduated.
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Both underwear and outerwear are very unfinished and I’m superstitious about showing work at this early a stage, so I’ll just show a little glimpse of the effect in this last photo. The skyline is Vancouver, Canada.