Feb 2010 Update.

Nov 2009 - This was the start of my first main project as a 1st year. The brief was to create designs for a fashion fabric using drawing, disperse printing and Illustrator. I had to hand in 5 50x50cm drawings, 3 A3 Illustrator images and 6 to 8 A2 size disperse printed fabrics. We had approximately 6 weeks to do this, with two week rotating workshops in each discipline. The subject as you can probably tell, was flowers. My favourite being a hydrangea,  which was quite hard to get away from drawing. I decided to produce a Man's fashion fabric rather then a womens, looking at 18th Century mens clothing as inspiration.

Jan 2010 - This was the start of a short four week artist book project. This year is the 13th Annual Artist Book Fair in Leeds and Glasgow. As usual our college has several stands for the exhibition and our brief was to produce an artist book based around a chosen object and a series of repeat patterns bound into a seperate book.

My artist book was based around a vinyl figure I was bought whilst on a trip to Los Angeles in 2007. I decided to base my artist book on my trip to Los Angeles and the format of my book was a map. I screen printed a layout of the places I'd been to, along with illustrations and descriptions. I then worked back into the screen print with pen and ink. My time in L.A was bright and sunny and I wanted my images to reflect this.

 I looked at memory maps to give me ideas and also looked at the way maps are folded so I could mimic the folds for my finished map. Lastly I attached a cover with ribbon to keep the map closed. I'm really proud with how it looks. 

 In keeping with the look of my artist book I bound all my drawings, research and prints with corresponding covers and titles using the Japanese binding technique which works really well on seperate pages.

 As well as my map I also produced two mini artist books. These mini books contain only two loose pages with lino prints of an avocado and an avocado sushi roll. The books are called 'From Fruit to Roll.' One has green covers with brown prints and brown sash holding the pages together. The other has cream covers, green print and green sash. The title of the books are letters punched into copper plate, fixed to the covers.


I'm really looking forward to the exhibition. Our college has also been invited to show at the artist book fair in Amsterdam. Having a love of books means I've been really interested in the project and I feel it's something I would like to get involved with in the future.

Feb 2010 - Now the artist book project has been handed in it's time to research for the next project which is wallpaper. I was lucky enough to attend a special talk at Temple Newsam recently.  They are currently showing an exhibition of wallpaper called Wonderwall. The curator spoke to us about the history of wallpaper and gave us a tour of the exhibition. We also had talks from Allyson McDermott on reproducing historic wallpapers and Paul Simmons from Timourous Beasties. Have to say Paul was a really nice guy, really interesting and I took a lot from his talk. It gave me ideas for my current project and how I might want to take my practice in the future.

 

Screen printing my scarves at WYPW.

For the last couple of weeks I've been visiting the West Yorkshire Print Workshop in Mirfield near Dewsbury. It's a fantastic and cheap facility for artists to use. So far I have printed my sushi design on silk and cotton. And I've printed my Human Rights text onto cotton. I still have my Cherry Blossom and Seed Head designs to print. I've had to learn how to coat and expose the screens, which is useful. But the whole process of screen printing can be very time consuming. I'm not sure people realise how much time it takes.

This following photograph is me setting up the red cotton material for printing. I printed onto this material with magenta which looks fantastic on the red. This scarf is going to be finished off with an orange ribbon trim.


This is me printing the purple Human Rights text scarf. I found on printing onto the cotton that I had to give it six goes for the ink to take and show up nicely on the material.


I think the purple is possibly my favourite colour of this print. The words have actually come out really well. This scarf is going to be finished with a nice deep purple ribbon trim.




The following two photographs are of one of my sushi prints. I've printed onto a silk ready-made scarf in violet and I am hand painting pink into the design. The scarf will then be finished off with a pink organza ribbon edging.

Here is a quick update of my scarf designs. The image above and the next two below are my seed head design. I took the seed head I'd drawn and scanned it into Illustrator to duplicate it in a few different sizes. I actually ended up using only one size of seed head on my design, but I may add some small ones. I haven't decided yet.



It took me about 2 and a half hours to lay out this design onto the film. I drew a grid in pencil which made it easier to place the seed heads in a repeat pattern. This design is going to be 55cm x 55cm in size when printed.



For my next design I have decided to use a quote from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which can be found on the Amnesty International website. I am an Amnesty International supporter and I like the idea of highlighting world issues through design. The quote I am using is; 'All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.' I found a font that looks like an old typewriter font and have used this as my template. I have started to trace the letters onto the film. I am repeating the quote across the scarf in rows in order to make a pattern. This scarf is going to be 65cm x 65cm in size when printed.

Updates

Well it's been a while since I blogged as I've been really busy with finishing up my foundation course. Above is a picture taken at The BCTF in Harrogate and shows my printed scarves hanging up on their display board.

The show went really well and there was a lot of interest in my work, which was really pleasing.

After the BCTF I then helped organise and plan our end of year show within the college. We had to rearrange our working areas and completely paint mostly everything in order for it to look perfect. And I have to say it did look pretty good when it was all done. The picture below shows my area with my scarves, embroidered textile prints, 2D prints and my sketchbooks.



Through exhibiting at the BCTF I have been asked to supply some of my scarves to a Christmas Craft Fair called Bedazzled, which is taking place in the gallery of Bradford College later this year. I have been designing some new prints to use and have two new ideas.


This image above is a rough drawing of an adaptation of Cherry Blossom which is going to be one of the new designs. The other design is a seed head print that I had drawn in a sketchbook a couple of years back and have wanted to use for a while, but never got chance. I think they both will make perfect scarf prints and can't wait to get them printed up.

Neckerchief number two - design process

These are my sketched sushi images for neckerchief design number 2. I'm going to be scanning these in later and importing them into Illustrator to make up a repeat pattern. I'll post a pic of this when I have it.

New artwork for Dalot

Last year I designed some artwork for a friends ep. Since this time Maria (Dalot) has moved to New York and also has a record company. So I updated the artwork for the new ep. Above is the template for the new ep with my artwork laid out. The images I used are all hand drawn by myself, scanned in and just placed in Photoshop. I believe this is going to print soon, hopefully it all turns out well and I wish her all the best with it.

Preparing to show at British Craft Trade Fair - April

So I haven't updated for a while. Been a bit slack, but now I've got my new phone it's a lot easier to document things and get them straight onto my MacBook.

At the moment I am designing and printing some neckerchiefs to show at the British Craft Trade Fair in April.

I'm at the stage of printing the first and designing the second and third.



This first and second photo below are me preparing the screen for printing. There were a few areas that needed to be 'stopped' out so they wouldn't print. These were areas such as where the acetate had sat together causing a line on the screen. This took about 20 mins to do.




After stopping out I had to use brown tape to tape around the area to print. This is to stop the ink going through the screen and onto the print bed. It also protects the print area on the right which is my black colour. (You need separate images and prints for each colour that you are printing, this first print is the sole colour on my print)


To test the print I am first of all printing onto paper, before printing onto my fabric. Below is the first colour being printed.


First colour on paper;


This is the paper print with both colour and black;


Here is my first colour being printed onto fabric. I've gone for a really bright pink which I think will sit well with the black.


As well as pink I also printed purple. I found that the first colour added shrunk the fabric so my black would not match up completely. This is something to try and sort out when I next print on tues. Either I will have to fill in the gaps or possibly look to using another fabric that will not shrink.

These shots are pink and purple flowers both with black printed;