Print - Week 5

Now that my motifs have been exposed onto screen I can start to this about composition of motifs. This weeks print room session was screen printing with pigment dye. I mixed my own pigment dyes in a range of colours what fit my colour pallet. 

Pigment Dye

As a tester i just started off my doing a tester sample of all my motifs. It was nice to see how the motifs came out onto a simple cotton and I want to advance the screen printing further by printing onto other fabrics. I noticed that one some occasion if I took the squeegee over the motif more than one the motif doesn't come out as clear to if you only went over it once. An example of this is image 2. 

                                                     Image.1                                                           Image.2

I was surprised how quickly I picked up the techniques in from the Photoshop and Illustrator so this week I've been working on my digital designs. With digital designs I feel like you can layer up motifs more as you can alter the opacity. Where as in the print you you can't do that. I was also advised to draw up thumbnails of different design ideas in my sketch book to that I can clearly see my development from sketch book to practice. I printed one digital design out in LAB Colour and I was taken back by how the colour was not completely different to how it was showing on screen but they were more vivid. This is something I'm going to have to take into consideration when printing out my next digital designs. I would also like to digitally print onto a lighter fabric to see which designs work well on various fabrics. 

Print - Week 4

 

This week in the digital lesson I looked at my colour strip and how to select colours in Photoshop to represent our colour image. My image is a photograph taken by Mike Jones. I came across some of his images in the previous project whilst looking for a colour pallet. I picked this particular image as I felt the colours really jumped out at me and think this is something I want to represent in my prints. Overall my colour image has go quite a flamboyant, rich and warm feel to it, which is what I wanted in my colour pallet. 

Also this week I got introduced to the heat press. This transfer print technique took me a fair few attempts to get the colour right on the transfer paper as the disperse dyes aren't the same colour as what they are going to come out like on the synthetic materials when heat is applied. I also added cut out shapes to block some of the colour from going onto the material so create more of what looked like a negative space. Some of these shapes moved and made more of a shadow to the rest of the print but I liked how it created a hazy/ fuzziness to the shapes. 

Morning Lecture - 13th February 2014

Yesterdays morning lecture came at a bit of a shock to me. Whilst Kate was taking the lecture and showing a PowerPoint we were told we can do 'doodle', but doodling can be anything from using pencil and pen to stitch and tearing the material you're using. I found this interesting as even though I felt like I was concentrating on what my doodling looked like, I feel like I still took in a lot of information. I don't know if it was a coincidence that I took in more information whilst 'doodling' or if it was to do with my creative mind set and having the opportunity to multitask in the morning lecture.

        

Print - Week 3

During the Christmas holiday I was told to start thinking about motif designs to be exposed onto screens. At first it took me a while to get my head around the DATA theme. I soon realized that data is in my  everyday life and that it wasn't just something scientific and mathematical. I've based my overall theme around time and how we record things in diary's, calenders, how we are always constantly looking at the time and making time. This then got my thinking about objects that tell time. I then developed this further and to see how make time. This included things from how we use time management to what make time go round. So looking into cogs within watches/clocks. This then got me to my motif ideas at the start of the term. 

This week began with working with the hand painting on screen with reactive dyes. This was a quick technique when you can get hand painted marks on to screen and then screen print them as normal with a manutex layer which releases the image onto the fabric. I found that the dyes worked a bit like water coloured paints. My first sample of this technique was based upon the development drawings from the research weeks. I want to develop the hand painted samples further in the project.  I also go the chance to dip dye and tie die fabrics with direct dyes. I prefer to work on a coloured background and it will suit my colour pallet/image better as there isn't much white in the image.