Designing assignment 2

DECIDING ON THE COMPOSITION:

First I had to choose which image to go with.
I made some little squares and had a go at various ideas.
The image from the dark hall still appeals a great deal, and my start on weaving it showed me that it has a lot of potential, but needs more work on getting the juxtapositions of colours right, so not for this time.

For the scaffolding variation I wanted something dramatic with strong contrasts, that doesn't lose the strength of the parallels that appealed in the first place. 

I tried various ideas, and the most appealing was the one with the most impact and apparent simplicity. The background has the pattern from my machine-sewn sampler.

Having decided this, I tried it out on rectangular shapes to work out which arrangement (and whether large scale design, repeat pattern or border) would be best from a composition point of view. Most of the variations had the flat quality that I associate with constructivist design. I ended up with a border, but then realised that in order to retain the features that appeal to me I would have to make the repeat larger than was possible on an A3 sized background.

I therefore decided to use the final piece as if it were the corner of a larger piece, to show the border at a good size.

MAKING THE FINAL SAMPLER:
I found a large piece of white cotton and cut it into several A3 pieces.

I drew out what I think of the poles layer first, to get the corner right. I traced one square 'block' and turned it over to give me the reflection at the corner.

TEXTURE:

Then I drew out the background texture on a piece of A3 tracing paper, keeping some of the same lines to give me something to align myself along. This background texture was based on this piece of embroidery sampler, but extended to cover the whole background of the border.

I used tracing paper as a template for the screen, painting in the negative spaces with the filler liquid (blue). Because of the tracing paper underneath it made a beautiful pattern, a little like the wave patterns on a beach.

I was anticipating that this pattern would have to be washed away before printing, but in fact the tracing paper stuck to it, meaning that the pattern stayed in some places.

An example of serendipity.

COLOUR:
Because of my own awareness of the need, and because of the comments of my tutor after assignment 1, I have deliberately done more colour work in my sketchbook than would have come naturally. One of the exercises I set myself was to spot interesting colour combinations in Vogue, and put feelings to them.

Doing this I found two colour combinations that I thought would work well with the image I was using for assignment 2.

This pink-brightred-brownypurple colour scheme was more fun, young and lively, with big contrasts. My notes show that it reminded me of 1960s images.











This skyblue- bluewhite - midbluegrey combination was very cool and like a Northern horizon, with a much narrower range of tone and was responding in a different way to the geometric pattern - more to the mechanical, inhuman aspect than to the hope and freedom aspects of it.





I did what I could to match the colours by mixing acrylic paints, to see approximately the effect of using those colour combinations with the image.

  

At this point I decided not to choose between them, and see if I could try them both out.

While the course notes suggest we could either make the print, or do a sketch of it, I was excited about the possibility of following the design through to a finished print, so was aiming to do that.





SHAPE:

The geometric lines are the most dramatic aspect of the shape. I drew them with blue gel onto the screen, and once dry, covered it in wax according to the instructions. I noticed that the new pot of wax was much thinner than the old one, and seem to need more than one coat to cover the screen properly.

Unfortunately the viscosity of it meant that it stuck to the paper underneath, and that it dried in streaks.

This photo shows the paper stuck to the back of the screen.

I decided to try printing it anyway, to see how it would turn out, and it looked like this, with dark squiggles, presumably where the layers of screen block dried differently from each other. The bars we printed well, but I couldn't use this because of the background.

I cleaned the screen and re-prepared the geometric lines, this time using only one layer of wax. The first test print was good, but subsequent ones barely printed at all. I have kept one of these in my larger sketchbook. I tried washing the paint out but it was already dry. I do not understand why this might be, other than that it was a hot day.

This is the trouble with a correspondence course - that you can only learn from what you have at home, and the CD that came with the screen printing kit, and the instructions in the course work file could not tell me what I had done to speed up the paint drying.

At this point it was obvious that the screen was ruined and it would not be possible to complete all three layers of the print. So I reverted to the idea of a sketch, using the first background texture layer I had already printed as the base of it. That is why my final sketch is on cotton.

For the scaffolding poles I painted them on with acrylic paint and a paintbrush, using the same template as I had used for the screen. This did not give the same blocky quality as screenprinting them, as the edges were more blurred and the pressure less intense and equal throughout.

For the final layer, I cut a stencil out of sticky vinyl, and sponged the paint on through it.

My final sampler for assignment 2

Ways of thinking doing and being

Today I want to try to put into words something that has become gradually obvious to me over the time I have been doing this course. It will be no surprise to anyone else, no doubt, but there is a striking difference between the way my mind works, and the way I am, while doing the coursework, and the way I am in other contexts in my day to day life.

This isn't just about how I go about solving problems. It's also about the way I think about what I'm doing. And the state of my body when I'm doing it.

So here I am writing in sentences and lists. This is the way I sort things out at work. How I am expected to express myself - with verbal clarity and without too much ambiguity if I can. My ability to do my job is judged, to an extent, by the effectiveness of the editing I impose on my writing and speaking. And how cleanly it results in the hoped for outcome.  

I have experienced a very different way of going about things during this course. 

For a start, there is no hoped for outcome. No one knows what the result will turn out to be. That's the fear and adventure of it. Especially, I suspect, for someone like me with a lifetime of goal-directed living behind them. Setting out on a journey into the unknown without a map or a phone. Who knows where I will end up? Or if I am up to the challenge. 

It is quite uncomfortable. My confidence is built on experience. And I haven't done this before. Each time I start an assignment I am a novice again. 

This means that instead of gathering information and organising it, I am imagining and experimenting. Imagining what is possible, trying it out visually, seeing what it looks like and where it takes me. There is a swing from opening up to possibilities, to deciding which to try out, to opening up again to all the experiments that can flow from them, and back to deciding again. 

It's rather a clunky process in fact, this switching mode (more like reconfiguring the machine than clicking a switch) and often accompanied by a lot of self-doubt and some procrastination. Mairi Hedderwick (artist and illustrator) on Desert Island Discs this week said 'all creative people' feel discouraged as part of the creative process (or words to that effect) - when they reach a point where what they produce is not quite what they had envisioned. If I were in fact in a strange country without a destination this method would get me walking around in spirals and sometimes deciding to stay in the place I had already found and getting to know it better, rather than always looking for new places. I'm not used to that idea at all - no goal but to follow my nose. 

And wow what a brave new way of deciding where to go - by tapping into a  neglected part of my humanness that quietly pulls me back to one thing rather than another, without logic. Without any words. 

It's not attractiveness in the conventional sense. If I had to put words to it it's because something about it seems right, intriguing, enlivening. More about my inner state than about the thing I'm looking at. 

But I'd rather not put words on it because all my life I have been trained to put words to things and I have noticed some resistance in myself, because this sometimes separates the thing from something important in itself. Especially things like this, that are about responding to the essence of myself. (At times like this I can understand why you might not want your photo taken.) 

So, here I am, nearing the end of this module, and suddenly there's an 'outcome' to aim for again - assignment 2 - and I'm feeling regretful that I have to leave this intriguing no-man's-land and fix myself back into the map. 

Trying out screen printing textures

BLEACHING:
I had seen the idea of bleaching out the dye as a way of making a pattern on fabric with a screen. I thought I would give it a try, and could perhaps use it to create texture for my assignment piece.

I sketched this pattern onto the screen, based on background patterns in the shady parts of the scaffolding.

I kept some of the lines double, and some thick, in order to find out which had the better effect.

Then, printing onto a piece of dyed (but not fixed) cotton, I used thick bleach instead of paint through the prepared screen.

The colour was bleached out very quickly. So quickly that the design spread before I could wash out the bleach.

It was easy to see that the double lines looked better and more scaffolding-like than the thicker ones.

This is what happened when I washed the bleach off immediately - it didn't work enough.

And this is the result of diluting the bleach 1:1 with textile medium to slow it down - it didn't bleach the dye out at all and all you can see is stained areas where it was.

After doing all that i thought it would be worth checking that you can in fact dye on top of bleached areas once the bleach is washed out.

You can.

OTHER TEXTURES:

I tried some other ways of altering the texture of screenprinted paint.
String underneath the screen made very little difference, but string above it gave loopy variations in the texture of the paint, but it was not very predictable because the string inevitably moved when I moved the squeegee over it.

Talc sprinkled on the paper was a good way to get a starry sky image.

Washing out the wax a bit, but not completely, gave a grainy texture in some places, which I rather liked.

Sprinkles of drying paint on the screen, interspersed with talc, was my favourite effect (bottom right), but not recommended if you want to reuse the screen!


WOVEN EFFECTS:

Finally today, I made a weaving, trying to explore other ways of making the parallel lines and shadowy horizontals that appeal to me about the scaffolding.

I used translucent fabric for the weft, and twisted it for some of the rows.

More scaffolding

This is what it looked like when I did the 3 layers of scaffolding with the screen I prepared earlier:

The colours were chosen to give the contrast between the eye-popping green and the soft grey of the poles. The green is close, but not quite blue enough here.

I found it difficult to judge where to put the blocks in relation to each other.  You can see that the lines are not quite aligned. and the blocks to not lead on from each other but leave a gap between.

You can just see the last block which only has 2 layers.

This was a more successful print, in that the colour was better, and the joins are less apparent.

I like the way Payne's Grey looks when diluted - a lovely subtle blue grey.

 You can see that I tried graduating the intensity of it for the left hand column, which is interesting and could be useful, but unfortunately turned out a little blotchy initially.

The pink showed through a bit more than I intended here, and I think in fact should be a little darker.

What happened to the screen:

Ah, learning by experience is so much more effective than reading other peoples' advice. 

My screen was ruined by my taking so long over this, and not being careful to add screenprinting medium every time. 

So I used the screen to make some prints:

The screen block for this print was the glue left over after I took the stencil off.
The shadows above were contact prints from the screen afterwards.
I think it looks very attractive, and the grey gives it an antique look which I could use some day.

Finally, I printed some more of the 'shadows' onto reclaimed cotton sheeting, and drew the scaffolding pole lines onto it with a sewing machine, using varied thickness and colour of thread to see which worked best.

First try at screen printing

I can see already that there are lots if ideas I would like to explore more, and I've started on the first in my sketchbook today.



This advertisement from Elle was interesting to me mainly because of the background. It is made up of light coming through a screen (relevant for a screen-printing module), and has something of the quality of houndstooth check, but with odd pattern-ground repeating shapes.

I wanted to try different ways to capture something about this. First I tried coloured pencil,  and rapidly found that it worked best to use three colours rather than just two.

Then I tried using paper with holes punched in it. It was obvious that part of the impact is because of the regularity of the holes.



The ideas I tried the worked best were the two with regular patterns of holes in more than one colour, with varying sizes of hole.

I can see that during his part of the course I'm going to have to focus on working out how to screen print as well as I can, and that this will involve doing a lot of practice with various different materials and dyes/ inks. It makes sense to try it out early at least once, so I know what kind of things can be varied while using this technique.

I have a simple acrylic screen printing kit at home, which I tried (without a lot of success) to use last year. So after reading the instructions carefully this time, I decided to do a quick screen print just to give me an idea of where I'm going to have to concentrate my attention.

This was the pattern I decided to go with to start with - texture from the first page of my new sketchbook, aimed at putting a design onto a t-shirt. I wanted to do two colours, to give it a feeling of depth like in the sketchbook piece. I drew it freehand, liking the way the shapes were in lines in two directions, but that the spacing was not so regular or predictable as if I'd measured it out. I think the G is the important part of this design in the context of a t-shirt and that the increasing distance between the lines in both directions, and the corner without texture, would emphasise this. I hope.

I went by the instructions for the acrylic screen-printing kit, rather than the ones in the course work, mostly because they were clearly using different mediums and different kinds of paints/inks.

The first thing was to prepare myself for messy work, cover the outer part of the screen in duct tape, and then trace the part of the design which would be printed, onto the screen using a blue sticky liquid.

When this dried, I spread a clay-like substance as evenly as I could over the top of it, and then let that dry. 

Once dried, I sprayed it on both sides with a water bottle, until the blue stuff was gone. All these different steps were to allow the clay to block the paint from going through to the paper underneath. It was quite confusing as to whether I was getting it the right way round or not. 

You can see that I had previously used this screen once and had left it unwashed for too long so it was a bit stained before I started.

These are the first two imprints I did of this screen, using purple as in the original cut paper 'sketch'. 

And this is the first try on a t-shirt. From this I learned that you have to protect the area around the print from transfer from the frame. Which was in the course instructions but didn't make much of impression when I read it. Now I know!

This is the same screen at the next stage, where I painted in the parts I wanted to be the greyer paler purple, and then spread on the 'clay'. This is it drying.

The next step was to overprint the grey on top of the purple. At this point I learned the importance of marking the position of the screen on the fabric, to ensure it goes in the right place!

T-shirt 1 - two colours screen printed onto t-shirt

This looked interesting, but didn't show up the letters in the way I had hoped.
And the texture was quite stiff - at which point I realised i had used the wrong medium.

I was washing out the screen and thought the way it washed out unevenly was interesting, so I printed another second layer using the half-washed screen.

T-shirt 2 Printed with half-washed screen, giving a more intense textured finish to the bottom half. The second colour did not allow the first to show through. So the texture is because of the extra layer of paint under some parts of it.

Texture after printing t-shirt 2

This is a detail from t-shirt 1 showing that I did manage to capture some
of the repeating irregular holes with shadows that I intended.
What didn't work was the contrasting sections of lettering.

Oh, and I took a photo of the paints I used for this, just to show I'm working on improving my colour skills deliberately every time I make something.

The colours for these screenprinted t-shirts were mixed
from primary colours and white

What I learned from this first try (in no particular order)

1. Two screens are better than one. I'm also wondering about splitting a screen into 2 sections, as my screen is quite large. But that is probably asking for mess. 

2. Don't forget the textile medium.

3. Mark the position of the screen on the fabric/ paper the first time.

4. Protect the background

5. Wash the screen as soon as possible. 

6. Try out small repeating images and find out how they work printed in various ways. In layers, rotated, different colours, on different kinds of fabric and patterns. 

7. Look up what artists have done with screen printing. 

8. This try made interesting texture, but the image didn't come through like it would have done with stencils, or block printing. I need to do a simpler image until I'm better at it. Or try stencils.