I made it with my hands

This is my new favourite Rob Ryan screen print. I love the sentiment, I'm sure it will ring true with a lot of creative people too. You can buy it here.

Walcott Vintage Market, Bath

Such a subtle print created with such an intricate design.

love the cross hatched texture created in these two prints 

beautiful chinoiserie style embroidery used in this shawl 

adore the brush stroke painterly effect created in this stripe print.

Dealing with disaster

So this morning was spent working out how to conceal my printing mistake that happened on tuesday. I found some curtain tape in a box of scraps that I thought I could use in place of some cotton tape.

Fiona and I spent some time fiddling about with it to see how we could conceal it, whilst turning it into a feature.

There was this option of turning it into a tie in some way, but I wasn't keen on the shapes it made, and I thought it would restrict movement which I thought would be impractical.

I had the idea of creating loops in the tape so that tools could be hung from it like I shown above. But in the end I went with Will's suggestion that I turn the mistake into a feature, as it looked a bit like soil, and turn it into a 'soil' border that frames the print around the top and bottom edge.

Screen printing

When I came in today my screen was ready to print with - Yay!

I was pretty nervous about printing though, as I will be printing straight onto my finished garment, so there is no going back if I made a mistake. So I printed on a few separate pieces of calico before I took the plunge, these will also give me an opportunity to practise painting with my procion dyes onto the screen printed areas.

This is the result of the screen print, which I'm really happy with. I then went onto to bite the bullet and print directly onto the print. This was quite tricky, as the pleats in the fabric at the top of the skirt made it difficult to keep the screen close to the fabric. This resulted in two of the prints coming out with thicker lines and some smudges. To solve this problem I have decided to hand embroider these two prints to give them better definition.

I also had a bit of a print disaster on the print to the middle of the skirt. I forgot to retape up the edges of screen after cleaning it in between prints and so I am left with a splodge at the top. I'm thinking of a way I can cover it or conceal it. maybe with a another pocket or some sort of cotton tape or ribbon?

Creating a print design with photoshop

I spent the last couple of days coming up with a design for my screen print which will feature around the skirt of the apron dress.

I had already selected the embroidery transfers that I want to use, based on the fact that they needed to be wildflowers that are in bloom during the months of April, May and June.

My first task was to trace the original transfers in black fine line pen onto white paper and scan them onto my laptop. This makes it easier for me to cleanup and work with the motifs on photoshop. I then removed the white backgrounds from each of the motifs and began to manipulate them into a design that I was relative happy with. This took a long time as I want to make the blooms look they were creeping up the dress, but I also needed to take into consideration the colour that each bloom will be painted in so even spread of the colours over the print.

As you can see from the picture above I put the designs into a repeat to see how the print will join up when printed side by side. Here are four slightly different designs. I was playing about with the placement of the bee and butterflies to see which would work best with the repeat.

This was the final design that I decided on with the help of some of my class mates and Fiona. Luckily I finished it and printed out onto A3 before the end of my day in the studio today so that I could get it exposed onto a screen ready for my next day in the studio next tuesday.

1940s print inspiration

I have been looking at some original floral printed fabrics from the 1940s which are sold by Donna Flower to help me design my screen print using my great grandmothers embroidery transfers.

I think that this type of layout would work well for my design as the flowers look like they are growing in one direction, rather than just scattered about.

I like the use of wildflowers and wheat in this design.

Although in this design the flowers look quite stylised which is not what I am trying to achieve, I like the use of the grid as a background, as grids and nets were something that featured heavily on my allotments.

I like the use of outline in this print.

Monoprint or Monotype?

Charlie told asked me whether I was interested in her showing me how to use mono printing, and said yes, so we are going to have a go at it next tuesday when I see her next.

So in preparation I have been doing a little online research into what is is, how to do it, and what sort of results you can get. I found a pretty interesting explanation at monoprints.com. After reading through their website I think that what I will doing is actually monotype, as although pretty similar mono print is when you use a pre-etched plate so you can reproduce the same image with added extras over and over. Monotype is when you paint an image onto; or complete ink up and work into (removing patches of ink with various tools); a blank plate.

According to the website monotype has been implemented by artists including Degas, Matisse and Gauguin. In fact it is believed that Gauguin invented the method of direct trace drawing - laying paper on to a blank inked plate and then drawing the image directly on the back of the paper. Below is a example of Gauguin using this method.

Two Marquesans by Paul Gauguin

image from here

Using Mannequins

Today we meet our new lecture for thursdays - Fiona. She encouraged us to have a go at pinning some of our samples onto mini and standard sized mannequins to enable us to get an idea of how our samples might be used in a garment.

Using the mini mannequins, you can visualise how the samples might look if they were made on a larger scale.

I then moved on to pinning my samples onto a standard sized mannequin....

I think the finger knitting that I did works really well as a collar - a sort of interpretation of the collars of the Maasai tribe.

During year 0 we are only really allowed to screen print using paper stencils or masking off areas i.e. with yarn or lace. Getting a screen exposed is reserved for years 2-3. Although you can still create some nice prints using this method, it does make the task quite labour intensive as you can only use a paper stencil a couple of times before it starts disintegrating. I really can't wait until we get to expose some screens!

I was speaking to Fiona about this, and she suggested I try a process that one of her friends uses in her artwork. You paint thickly with acrylics onto thick cartridge paper and then lay your fabric over the wet painted image of design and press down so the fabric takes the paint.

I used the back of the rag rug sample that I did, the process of rag rugging created this unintentional pattern on the back which in turn reminds me of the rows of tiny glass seed beads used in the Maasai's Jewellery.

This was the first attempted, which actually turned out to be my favourite, I really liked the painterly effect that the print shows.

I found that the paint dries quite quickly, and so you have to be really speedy, so it is difficult to create a very intricate or precise design. As you can see, I have daubed the paint on pretty haphazardly in my haste. I think this would be a difficult process to use on a large scale.