Skip to main content

Screen prints

two layers waterbased ink on calico fabric
Two full days of screen printing practise has left me with an aching back but considerably more skill at getting nice clean crisp prints,some of which are multilayered and multicoloured.  I like screen prints, I like the clean sharpness they have but because of that I find them hard to work into with embellishment.  And.. the truth is I really like the embellishment business more then the printing...This difficulty is further compounded by my chosen design being very busy - lots of line work and detail, so because of that I decided to spend some time masking out lot of the detail and trying a different approach to the print finish.
In the end after careful consideration I masked out most of my 'bottom' layer-  some very busy linework  originating from a tall ships drawing - and immediately the prints started to look tidier.

silver foil on black velvet
I also spent quite a lot of time experimenting with different fabric bases, trying to stick with natural fibres - cotton velvets, pure cotton, canvas, some linen and several different colourways.  It was interesting seeing how the different colours worked on different bases and also how the pattern and colours could be lifted using foils.  When we did screen printing last time I didn't get time to use foils much but I have tried lots of different colour combinations this time as part of the effect I want to achieve is a south east Asia / oriental bling look....

I have different sized prints to experiment with but as always they start to look less exciting and over worked after two weeks messing around so I have put them to one side and concentrated on making, writing and posting christmas cards... a labour of love - a satisfying fun job now completed


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Scotland part 2

The second half of the week continued in much the same vein.  We had one rainy afternoon which was actually quite nice to be holed up in the house with the rain lashing the windows.  It probably wasn't quite so nice for the two visitors that came on their bikes but they're tough cookies - and its only water- but I did feel sorry for them having to cycle six miles back down the track in the wind and rain, but given Scotland,  it wasn't as bad as it could be.

Funchal

So after three days at sea we finally hit Funchal in Madeira.  An escape from the ship, and I have to say it was very pleasant indeed.  First of all the weather is really splendid.  Especially when you know that everybody else in the UK is suffering grim storms and vile winds..  Over here it is between 22 and 25 degrees is really quite warm.    Funchal is a pretty city. It's built on a hill it with lots of lovely white houses with stunning red roofs.   In order to get the best of it we walked along the sea front until we got to the cable car and we took it up the hill.  It was a really good ride much longer than we imagined and it's quite weird because it goes right through the town -  completely over everybody's house...  So not only do you get a lovely vista of the bay but you can view the beautiful rooftops and get to look in everybody's gardens and to look at their picnic sets.. clean washing nice plants... scratty backyards.... We got off th

ROCKS - in which I share the Hopetoun and Esperance pictures....

 I'm about to post a load of pictures of rocks... look away if you are not interested...There are more but its faffy making them smaller to upload so I'm doing it a bit at a time... Enjoy mount Barren rocks on summit Mount Barren Views... Cave Point - unreachable cave Small reachable Cave scree to unreachable cave Frenchmans Peak Cave Frenchmans peak View Frenchmans Peak Summit Esperance Headland Boulders Esperance Headland with fisherman for scale Eperance other headland cave Esperance other headland...