Relating Designs

After establishing what my design were going to look like I started to look into different designers, I found a few images from Holly Fulton's F2012RTW collection which I felt really related to my designs. I feel that these designs relate to my own work and prints, more specifically my digital work rather than my screen prints, as she has used a gradient effect, which I have also used.

   

Some of the colours in Holly Fulton's designs are also quite similar to that of my own. The bright pinks and the deep reds really stand out against the darkness of the black and create a beautiful contrast.

However, one designer which has stood out to me is Peter Pilotto, especially his Resort 2013 collection. The colours are so similar to mine and have really shown me how I can proportion my awkward colour scheme to my advantage. The composition of his prints are exquisite and I wish I had seen this collection a lot earlier in my project as I would have been able to use this inspiration in a much more productive way. Here are the images that I have found and been inspired by.

                               

The colours in these specific designs are really similar to that of my own. I also feel that they have been used in the same proportions as my own, the purple and reds are the most dominant with a hint of green and orange, which I what I have been trying to achieve myself.

More Screen Printing

This past week I have spent all of my time in the print room, I really like the print room as it is always full of people creating work and it is quite inspirational.. and theres always people to ask advice from! However I am a very impatient person as Screen Printing just is not for me. Maybe in smaller doses, however I have found the past week quite stressful and have only been able to produce a hand full of designs. In the future I will plan my time better after having this experience. Here are a few of the prints that I did manage to finish.

I really started to enjoy printing after creating the last three prints you can see. I used a blank screen, which I masked off to create a a4 shape, i then added Pigment dyes and used the squeegee to create a multi coloured background. After waiting for this to dry I then used my screen with my motifs and layered my designs up on top of the background. I feel these are my favorites from the designs, which I have created, but I still feel that they can be better. Personally I favour my digital designs, as I am just a more digital girl. I think that with maybe another week or so in the print room that I could vastly improve my designs further. 

Screen Printing

Over the past 6 weeks we have had access to the print room. Here I have experimented with a number of different techniques such as mono printing, screen printing and dip dyeing. However not all of these techniques have been pursued in the later weeks of being able to use the print room as these techniques just did not suite the style of prints that I wanted or the overall finish that I picture.

I feel that the technique which has worked the best for me is Screen Printing. This is because the colours that are achieved with the Pigment dyes were perfectly matched to those in my original image. The Pigment dyes also allowed the dye to sit on top of my fabric allowing the colour to be pretty much exactly the same once applied to a fabric. Where as with the Reactive dyes the fabric would absorb the dye easier and some of the colour would be lost of distorted.

My screen was made up from around 7 motifs all together but I have not used all of these as they just did not work. Looking back I feel I should have given more thought to my motifs and how they would have worked being used together.

  

Here are two of my screen prints which I feel have not worked. Although the two motifs that I have used I liked, I do not like them once placed onto fabric. The first image went well at first but the placement of the print was just not right. However I do like the over lapping of colours and motifs to give a 3D effect with the motif. The second image looks too much like a flag for my liking, the composition is off and the colours are not right being placed together. This is something I have definitely struggled with, combining my colours.. as the colours I have used do work well together, but only in certain combinations.

Peer Review

So this week we had Peer Reviews.. to be honest I was very nervous about this as I felt that the volume of work that I had created was just not enough. However once the reviews started my mind was put to rest a little. My personal review actually went quite well, the people reviewing my work were very constructive in their critiques, commenting on the composition of my work saying that they felt my work was very cohesive and worked well as a collection.

In fact their only criticisms were that there was no annotation in my sketchbook and that they wanted to see more colour in the backgrounds of my screen prints, which is already something I had began to think about myself anyways. Personally I do not like annotation in sketchbooks, I feel it is unnecessary and makes the books look messy, if I ever do annotate my work it is only ever one work to sum up the mood or the idea I am trying to portray at the time.

Reactive Dyes

This week I feel like I have really utilised my time in the print room, using every second to my advantage. However the print room takes up a lot of time to produce the tiniest amount of work, and is often demoralising when you have put a lot of time and effort into something that has taken all day, and you are not overly satisfied with the outcome. This is why I feel maybe digital prints are more my type of thing. However I have found it fun and interesting to experiment in the print room as this is what textiles is all about.

So today I concentrated on Reactive Dyes. This is still a very simple way of mixing dyes, using a small amount of dyestuff with a little bit of water added. I then used this dye to paint straight onto a clean screen. Using a clean screen allowed me to develop different motifs or backgrounds without the restraints of my exposed screen. So today I focused on creating a background. The fabrics which I used to do this were a variety of silks, I feel that the reactive dyes are much more vibrant when used on silks n comparison to cotton which develops a much more subtle colour.

Dying Fabrics

After developing several prints on plain white cotton I decided that I wanted to mix things up a little, and in order to include more of my colour palette it was necessary for me to dye some fabric, or to buy coloured fabric. However when I visited the A4 and more store I was really put off by the lack of colour selection they had. Maybe for a different project but right now the colours that they supply were just not going to work for my project. So, I decided to dye my fabric myself. As I am not a very patient person this was already off to a bad start! I got together my ingredients for the dye, and decided that I wanted to dip dye my fabric from a dark grey to a softer grey. This did not go to plan, it took about 2 hours for my fabric to eventually even take any colour and then it turned out purple!! Luckily for me purple was in my colour palette so all was not lost. I decided to do some pigment prints on the dyed fabric but I am still not that much of a fan of this technique. I will visit different fabric shops around manchester to gather some better fabrics.

 Making sure that the water is at the correct temperature is very important, dying fabrics is a very precise process and definitely does not suit me.

Digital Printing

After a few digital sessions we had to decide upon one design which we would like to send to the digital printer, I had three specific designs to choose from as some of the other designs which I had created on Photoshop I was not very pleased with. Here is the final design which I decided to send to the digital printer.

I ended up choosing this design as I felt it reflected the mood of the image I had originally chosen as inspiration. It also includes all of the colours from my final colour swatch, shown in earlier posts. At first I really was not happy with the colours that I had chosen as I felt that there was no direction with them, and I am also not used to using so many colours. However, the amount of colours that I have chosen may have hindered me in my digital process' I feel that they have enhanced my screen prints.

Print Room

Today we have been in the print room developing colour. I mainly focused on Pigment dyes today, which is a very simple way of mixing, using the pigment bonder, mixing with a pigment colour. It is very important to use the tiniest amount of colour as it is very vibrant and one drop goes a very long way. I really enjoyed mixing the colours but found it to be a challenge to find the right colour that I wanted. I took my source image into the print room with me to compare the dyes to the actual image which was a huge help. My plans are to buy some coloured fabric to print onto and to also dip dye some cotton to replicate a design that I have done digitally but to compare what it would be like done by hand. Tomorrow I plan to spend all day developing prints using the screen printing method.

Here are a few of the colours that I mixed today, I am still unsure on these colours but it is too late to turn back now.

Digital Designs

After developing my final colour palette I took my colour concept to my next digital session. Using Photoshop I developed a number of swatches, using every single colour that was in my source image. Although the amount of colour swatches I ended up with was scary it is also exciting because I have a lot of room to experiment and just enjoy using the colours. We also had to develop at least 6 more motifs and scan them into the computer. This was to create our own brushes from them, it was quite quick and easy once Sally had talked us through it initially, it is such a quick way to develop an idea I wish I knew about it much sooner!

Sally has asked us to use our colours in the same ratio as our images, so if there is a large amount of purple in our source image there should be a lot of purple in our digital design. It is very hard to find the balance between this and at first I did not get the grasp of this and have developed designs that I am not proud of but glad that I went through with them so that I could learn from my mistake and talk it through with Sally were I was going wrong.

Colour Conscious

So this week I have been concentrating on COLOUR! I have to admit, I am petrified of colour, I am usually sticking to very simplistic, minimal colour. I found myself steering back into this comfort zone earlier this week and it has set me behind a little with my development throughout the project which I do regret and it has taught me a lot. I originally wanted to take inspiration from this image -

However once I began to develop a colour palette using Designers Gouache I became really against the idea and realised that the small amount of colours was going to hold me back, and I did not want this to happen. So back to the drawing board I went.. searching through blogs, style websites and my own images, I began to search for images in which I generally was just captured by the colours used. I wanted to step outside my comfort zone.

Here is my final image in which I plan to use the colours as inspiration for my own work. This image in particular stood out to me on a fashion blog, the colours are so prominant and in your face, they actually scare me a little. However I think this will be a really good experiment for me not just in this textile world but as a designer in the future. 

So to start I began using Designers Gouache, creating a hand drawn colour palette but using my eye to really work out the colours in the image. This is to help myself as a designer to understand colour and have a better eye for colour. It is a longer process than simply using an eye dropper tool on Photoshop but it is a great way to learn.

Digital Session - Adobe Photoshop

Each week we have been having digital session with Sally, they have been really informative and useful to me. Although I am quite confident with Photoshop already as I have been using it for a while now, there is always something you do not know about Photoshop and Sally's teaching style has really allowed me to grasp these new techniques quickly.

Although I feel that I understand these techniques I have not been able to put them to much use. Every design in which I develop using Photoshop I HATE!!! We need to develop a colour palette for next weeks session, so this is what I will be concentrating on for now.

Final Images for Screen

These are the final 2 A4 pages that I have decided to send to be developed onto screen for printing. To allow these designs to develop I need to photocopy these designs onto acetate, I then need to double up the acetate so that the black is very very black. This makes sure that no light can pass through the image whilst being exposed. The exposing process takes only 3 minutes. Once the screen has been developed I then need to double check the screen for any holes or gaps in the screen and I will also need to mask it off using gum tape.

Screen Printing

In preparation for the print room we have been asked to develop enough motifs to fit onto an A3 section of an A2 screen. The amount of motifs was not a problem, however choosing which motifs to include was. I had that many designs that trying to edit them down was difficult and definitely something that I had trouble with, however I managed in the end. The task then was to decide how thick the lines were going to be, were I wanted to designate the colour and I also wanted to have a variety of digitally produced motifs and hand drawn ones. I much prefer digitally produced motifs as I find them cleaner and more precise, however I am excited to see the outcomes of the hand drawn motifs once developed onto screen.

This image is an example of the different decisions that had to be made during the designing process for the motifs for screen. The black is were the colour will come through on the screen, were as the white will be blocked out. Although it seems a small decision it makes all the difference once the screen is sent to be exposed.

Drawing Development

I have been carrying on drawing from my research and have found a few shapes that I really like and feel that I could carry on into a motif with. I have been working in black and white  from the beginning of the print textile world as these motifs are going to be developed for screen printing, however I am constantly thinking about different colour palettes that I could use once I have developed my screen.

Here I have experimented with composition and tone. I really like the last drawing as the tonal work has worked really well with this drawing, however the drawing itself is too large and scaling it down would make the lines thinner, and the positives that go to be exposed for the screen can not have any lines thinner than 0.5.

Drawing from Data

After doing a lot of research in the MMU library I collected a number of books and used photocopies from these books to draw my inspiration from. I tried not to stick to anything to specific as this was just an initial excursive to gather research and get drawing. So the books that I took data from were about geography, dental science, cancer cells and volcanos. This was due to the fact that as I flicked through the books I found some visually exciting graphs and diagrams that I thought I would like to develop further. Here are some of my drawings so far.

     

                    

Data

Well its the end of one project and the start of another! I have decided to go into the textiles world of Print. Print has always excited me and is always something that I have thought about doing, but not something in which I have fully explored.

So for the initial few weeks before we break off for christmas we have been asked to collect research around the word 'DATA'. This could be taken in any way we liked and we played a game of Chinese whispers to get a more abstract outcome. I heard the phrase 'paper, text and graphs' so off to the library I went.. I found that researching into other peoples research was pretty boring, but I was looking at the visuals rather than the written word.

We were given a task to then use different rules to aid our drawing skills. We had to create a maze, but using our own rules, I chose to use blind drawing for this particular piece. We were asked to document date such as the growth and age of a tree, we firstly had to use our left hands to control the pencil and not let the lines touch one another. The second attempt was using a long garden pole with a graphite stick attached to the end, we had to stand back from the paper, and draw using our normal hands this time. I feel that my left handed attempt worked quite well as I surprised myself by being able to control the pencil well. However the second attempt with the pole did not work very well, it went out of shape and it slipped a lot of times.

Once we had drawn using these set rules we were asked to apply them to our own drawings, drawing from the research that we had carried out earlier in the day. I took inspiration from a range of graphs that I had found in geographical books and books about dentistry. I also collected some data from my own flat, using the data that printed out from my own printer after cleaning the printer heads. I tried to experiment with media here, using graphite sticks, pencil, fine liner and gouache. Personally I do not feel that these have worked out as-well as I would have liked but it was just something to get us drawing again and thinking about the different ways in which we can make a mark.