Name: Bob

Country: usa

Message: HI  I now paint white turkey feathers with oil base paint to make them look like real eagle, hawk and owl feathers.  The only thing is, they look great, but the feathers are stiff.  I do not air brush, but rather paint with brushes to get the detail of these feathers.   What I would like to know is what dyes can I use this way to get these feathers to look real BUT also to have the softness of the feather?

I think you would get much better results by substituting a fabric paint for your oil paints. Fabric paints are designed to be soft after drying, while oil paints are stiff and hard, once the oil has polymerized to dryness. For a very thin, dye-like fabric paint, try Jacquard Products' Dye-Na-Flow, or Dharma Trading Company's Dharma Pigment Dye. Since these paints are colored with pigments, rather than dyes, they tend to be more resistant to lightfading than dyes are.

Other fabric paints should also work much better than your oil paints. Since feathers, like silk, are made of animal protein, any silk paint or silk dye would be a good choice. (see my page about How to Dye Silk.) If the feathers will ever be allowed to get wet, then you will have to properly heat-set the silk paint or dye, but if they will be kept dry and out of the weather, you can just let a paint such as Dye-Na-Flow dry. However, true dyes must be rinsed thoroughly after application. Silk paints are set with dry heat, such as a hair dryer or heat gun, while silk dyes are set by steaming, not with a steam iron, which would be inadequate, but rather in a steamer such as you might use to steam vegetables to cook them.

Dye-Na-Flow, like many silk paints, is available in a wide variety of colors, including black, pewter, burnt umber and brown, and you can mix the different colors of paint to get additional shades. Some fabric paints are available only in bright colors, but it seems very likely that blacks and grays and browns will be more useful for many of your natural-effect feather designs.


(Please help support this web site. Thank you.)