Screen Printing, Photoshop and Life Drawing

During the week at uni just gone I spent my time developing my heat transfer dyes and printing more, as well as doing some more Photoshop work with my scanned in collages. I also took part in another life drawing session, the outcomes of which I will be putting up on my drawing blog soon.

On Monday I was in the print room working with some more stencils and heat transfer dyes, which I hoped would continue on well from the week before, however they did not turn out as successful as I hoped. The stencils are not working out for me as I can only use paper/card in the heat press, and no matter how thick the card is the dyes still leak through after one or two prints, which means to be able to produce a length of fabric I would have to cut an awful lot of stencils. It also limits how much I can play around and sample this technique because I end up spending most of my time cutting out stencils. Another drawback is that the thicker card makes the colour look patchy as the dye cannot reach the fabric properly.So for now I'm leaving the heat transfer dyes alone, although I may do a large scale one later one because I still really love the effect the dyes create.

Different fabrics with heat transfer

Moving on from the heat transfer dyes I decided to screen print some printing pigment through an acetate stencil onto cotton to play around with layering up the colours. I used the ready made screens in the printing room but if I take this technique further I'm going to make my own screen to use. But for now the ready made and blank screens are an easy way to experiment with my ideas. I quite like how they turned out and I feel this could be a good alternative to the heat transfer dyes.

Two patterned screen prints then a blank print on top

A new technique I tried out towards the end of the week was mixing up my own reactive dyes to screen print with. This involves measuring and mixing the ingredients for the dye myself, and it can be used in the same way as pigment but it dyes the fabric rather than sitting on the surface of the fabric. I found using these dyes quite difficult however as they print differently on different fabrics. I think they were interesting to try out but I feel I do not have enough time left in this project to actually get to grips with using them, so for now I'm going to leave them as samples.

Acetate stencil next to the printed image

I used two stencils; three small dresses and a
larger shirt one

Besides my experiments with printing I also continued with my Photoshop work and started arranging compositions of my scanned in images of shirts and dresses. Alongside my fabric outcome I also want some prints or other paper items featuring my designs, as I feel they work well as an outcome themselves. Because as much as I want to recreate them in fabric, I also want to show the original designs themselves featuring my collages.

Possible composition for a print

Incorporation of one of the coloured stencils

Overall it was a good week but I don't feel like I achieved much in terms of my printing; having to leave the heat transfer dyes left me feeling like I'd taken two steps back from the position I was in last week. However I know I can keep pushing this project forward, and hopefully I will feel more positive again on Monday.