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.