Experiment with discharge printing

Another experiment from today, printing with discharge on to some cotton I had bought. This worked well until there was some mishap. It was all fine when it came out of the heat press, so I can only imagine the discolouration happened whilst washing it afterwards. You can just about see where there are some lighter patches which seem to be part of the design. So I don't know what happened there. Perhaps it can be covered up with some sort of embroidery or something.

Experiment with flock

An experiment from today with pigment and flock on to cotton. The colours are not too accurate in these images as the cotton is a much darker blue. I would have liked to print the heads using proceon dyes but wasn't able to due to the steamer being broken. So I settled with using pigment. The flock came out really well on the ferns.

more ferns and faces

And today I found some left over heavy brushed cotton from ages ago. So I thought I would print the Ferns and Faces design on to it and see how it turned out. I had this green colour already mixed up and wasn't too keen on it. However the colour worked quite well with the natural tone of the cotton. As expected, some of the print lies on top of some of the fibres on the fabric making it quite fragile. This is something I really like and I think it works well in relation to the passing of time as the image would change as it got more worn. You also get an embossed texture to the image where larger area of colour (the hair) go deeper into the fabric and the areas around these become raised.

more hair landscapes

At last I got round to taking photos of some other "hair landscapes" I had done a little while ago. I plan to carry on with them, I have just put them to one side at the moment as I concentrate on printing. I have just a week left at ECA so I need to make the most of it in the print room. These are mostly A1 in size and drawn with black ink.

Ferns and Faces Pattern

I had a play on Photoshop with an image and came up with this. Not at all happy with it really. I printed it on dyed grey cotton and it was a bit of an experiment for something different. I like how the faces stop being faces in a way and just become part of a larger pattern, but that's it really.

Ferns and Faces

I finally got the fern and faces print done. I printed a few, on calico and on fabric I had dyed different tones of grey. It is hard to tell the different fabrics on these photos but never mind. I like the simplicity of the one colour image. I will work into them a bit with embroidery at a later date I think.

I left the faces out of another print, with the idea being to embroider the faces in later on. This will take quite a while but i think it will prove to be pretty interesting.