Action packed week at college non stop info overload - lots of new words learned, Hetero-normative - not a word that crops up in everyday conversation.... but it popped up a lot this week as we considered fashion and clothes choices, design trends and historical bias for men and womens general attire... Do we wear clothes for modesty or warmth or really to make a statement! Why are mens outfits so often stereotyped - boring - formal - plain - all similar styled? Why do we notice when men wear florals, pink, flamboyant colourful outfits, flowing shirts, skirts etc.... and what messages does these clothes send?
It was an interesting informative thought provoking lecture and I feel an essay coming on .... I've got to write something for the module - I was going to do boring ethics and sustainability but this sounds more engaging and I'm feeling a wee bit low of sustainability at the moment having just purchased lots of synthetic material - but I will be making works of art which will last for ever and never go to landfill!!
Next up was masses of useful technical stuff about being self employed - agents, costings, paperwork, all good stuff and then a lovely messy ( I just love the way messy in the dictionary equate with slovenly - there no slovenliness in my dying - loads of mess ha hah) afternoon dying fabric and playing with the state of the art heat press making lots of almost slovenly heat transfer prints - I just love the way on paper the ink has no life - it looks flat and then you transfer it to fabric and it positively glows and the colours shout out!!
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| cleaning screen |
And then onto the practical hand on really MESSY stuff - I have set up from scratch my first ever self exposed screen.. Incidentally, that's not me exposing myself just the term for a prepping a screen. Its an A1 size screen print sampling a selection of my drawings, some hand rendered and some digitally manipulated with a view to practicing screen print and goodness knows I need the practice... and using a cross selection of drawings to try layering and overlapping.
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| paper pull through |
It was a big screen and being new to the process, it took some doing, I think that's why I'm not so keen on screen printing - there is so much washing scrubbing cleaning and more scrubbing and after a while it can feel a bit tedious - not so bad if you do a run of prints but quite a lot of faff for one off little prints. Granted its easier when there aren't so many people queuing for washing drying etc..
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| pink and orange photo doesn't do it justice! Its much more fun! |
Totally relieved that somehow I had got the process right and what had emerged was a screen with my actual drawings on it, I had time to run a quick pull through on paper to check the prints really worked. I also did a quick copy on a piece of bright pink fabric I found going spare in the print room, most people were using black to proof the screen but in the true sense of sticking to a random colour palate I used a mix off orange with a spot of red to deepen the tone pigment paint. I really like pink and orange together.
There's a lot of glorious mess and slovenliness to be had when mixing paints and lots of pretty patterns which are just accidental - I just cant help recording them...
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| smears and mess |
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