Silk, the queen of fibres, makes a wonderful painting surface - colour just glides on, creating exciting effects. In fact, painting on silk is all about the spread of the dyes - remember how the colour spreads when you spill a glass of red wine on to a white table cloth? When a brush full of colour is applied to white silk the same thing happens and silk painters need to be able to control that spread, as well as exploiting it. If control is required a resist is used as a drawing tool. That's why most personality types find painting with this medium so much fun and so therapeutic - from control freaks to loosey-goosey (you know who you are).

Silk painting has been around for more than three thousand years, so the experts tell us, and I really enjoy that sense of tradition and continuation. The main difference is that today we use synthetic dyes rather than natural dyes like saffron and indigo. I only paint, and teach with, the primary colours - two reds, two yellows and two blues (yes, I teach how to mix colours, either in your palette, or on the silk by layering the colours).