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.