End of City Lights Project

The last two weeks have been super busy for me, hence the lack of posts! My deadline for my final studio project of my second year, City Lights, was yesterday so I had a lot to finish and organise in time for this. But now that it's done I can share what has happened in terms of my work recently.

In my last post I talked a lot about screen printing and different dyes, but since then my project took a different turn and I moved away from these techniques and chose to focus on my digital work. My reason for doing this was that the prints I was creating felt like a step back from the sophistication of my digital designs, lacking the depth of the original scanned in collages. I realised I could not successfully recreate my work in a hand printed form, and that I would be better off spending more time developing my work in a digital form. So for the last two weeks this is what I've been doing, spending hours sat in front of a computer screen, which my eyes hate me for! However I feel this was a lot better suited to this project, and I'm quite happy with the outcome, which is a series of repeated patterns along with some visualisations of the contexts they could be used in.

The repeated patterns were created in Photoshop, as were the visualisations. I've always enjoyed digital work, so this was quite fun for me, although sometimes frustrating when the patterns wouldn't line up properly, or when the colours on the print outs differed from the screen. However I overcame these problems, and I feel I've improved my Photoshop skills quite significantly, which will be very helpful for third year. I printed out four of these repeating patterns onto A2 paper for my final outcome for this project, as well as some single designs onto A2 and some smaller groups of 9, to try and show how my designs work in many different scales and compositions. I also created an A5 booklet containing my visualisations of my designs being used in fashion and interior contexts. Some of these designs and visualisations can be seen below:

My favourite repeated pattern design

A page from my booklet featuring my designs as a wallpaper in a bedroom setting

Designs for backpacks

Another page from the booklet, exploring scale and placement

One of my compositions of 9 designs

 I also created a logo for this project to bring my work together and to get me thinking about how I want to present myself and my work in third year.

Logo for this project; also used on the cover of my booklet

As this project progressed I realised that the focus for my work is moving away from the methods of printing textiles by hand and towards digital, but still with a strong focus on my own drawings, experimenting with colour and composition. For me exploring fabrics through screen print and embroidery is still interesting, but it is no longer the area I feel fully engaged in. Likewise fashion does heavily inspire my work but I don't want to be making the garments myself. I feel that I am better suited to digital and drawing techniques, and I enjoy the challenges I face in these areas much more than in textiles. I already feel like I have much more focus and direction for my third year now; here's to hoping I feel the same when it starts!

My set up in the studio, which included my own photos, collages, experimentations with fabric and stencils, as well as my final outcomes.

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.

Heat Transfer Dyes and Stencils

My first few days back at uni after Easter have seen me really push my project forward. Before Easter I was starting to feel a bit lost, having developed my sketchbook work and collages as far as I could go and therefore needing to move into fabric, yet not feeling ready to do so. This was because I had decided I was going to make a fashion garment earlier on in the project but had now began to change my mind, not wanting my work to be limited by the fact I had already decided the outcome. So on Monday I decided to forget about the outcome and just get on with some experimentation with heat transfer dyes.

In order to try and recreate the torn paper in my collages I painted the heat transfer dyes onto newsprint paper then tore them into strips. I then placed these face down on my fabric and put the fabric into a heat press at 200 degrees for 40 seconds. I tried a variety of different matte, shiny, opaque and translucent fabrics so I could compare the different effects created, and the different strengths of dye that transferred. The resulting samples can be seen in the picture on the right. They have a long way to go till they start resembling my collages but they're a good starting point.

Also on Monday I played around with placing cut out stencils of clothing over my collages then scanning them onto the computer. The stencils were inspired by clothing I had seen on a fashion trend report, which I quickly sketched onto paper then cut out with a craft knife. Originally I did these so I could see how my collages could work as prints on garments, but once looking at the resulting images I realised they could be more than that. I showed them to my tutor and she suggested that they could be a print or pattern themselves when they are lined up together, whether for a garment or for a wall hanging or something else entirely.

Yesterday and today I continued to play around with this idea, cutting more stencils in coloured paper and editing some on Photoshop so they have a combination of different collages, like the one on the above right. This idea has really excited me and given me focus with my project again, generating a whole load of new ideas that I should hopefully be able to explore in the remaining three/four weeks of this project.