And yet more trees...

Remember when I did some spray printing with stencils and some screen printing with thickened dye back in April? Like most printing sessions, it generated a lot of prints (not all of which were entirely wonderful).  But often prints are a starting place for something else.

In my journal, I mounted the paper resists I'd used, which had quite a bit of pattern on then because of the resist already on the screen.

 

I also took one of the prints, that looked like this...

... and worked on it with Inktense pencils until I thought I could do no more.

 

It's still a funny looking tree but it's better!  

 

Back to thickened dye

Printing with thickened dye is something that's really interesting me at present. I think it has a lot of potential for me to combine my love of more formal printmaking with my need to work in textiles, rather than printing on paper. I love the way the hand of the fabric is still so soft, and I love the way you can  build up layers of colour in a fairly controlled way.

Well, that's the theory. My latest screen printing play day with Maz was a lot of fun but none of the results are likely to set the world on fire. I did find it instructive, though, which is the point of the exercise.

My first prints were on paper. OK, I know I just said I prefer fabric but remember that I'm also trying to include some tree prints for my Fibrecircle tree journal every time I do anything. I used the screen I created with wax resist back here and added some tree cutouts I've made from cartridge paper.

The results were a bit dubious, because the background was so busy that the tree silhouette tended to get lost. (The tree shape is also rather weird!)

I printed eight of these, thinking I could do different things with them, so I set a couple aside and put the rest in the to-do pile.

While I was doing paper, I tried a print with my oldest screen. It's was originally made by cutting jagged paper strips with scissors but I liked it so much I gave it a coat of resist so it's actually the reverse of the original screen.

It's quite interesting and I like it, though I have no idea what use it might be!

I used the same green on two samples I printed on the same day , the yellow one and the pale orange one.

Not terribly exciting but it's another layer. More to come...

Then I printed a calico bag that I dyed back in 2013. It was a bit boring...

 ... so I decided to add some printing. The first side was OK, though not exciting...

...but the second side wasn't much good, because the screen dried out a bit much between prints. I always forget it does that.

I think it might be quite interesting with some more layers added. We'll see.

Then I took some quilters' muslin fat quarters that I dyed with Maz last time. They were ones I thought were the least interesting. This one was printed with the oldest screen.

It's OK - quite interesting.

These two were printed with the newest screen. The first is OK but needs more to happen to it.

 This one is rather nice - I do like it.

 

As printing days go, I've had better results but it was fun anyway!

A little bit of printing does you good #2

My second lot of printing was a play day with my friend Maz. We decided to do some screen printing with thickened dye, which is something I want to do a lot more of. I've done quite a bit of breakdown printing, which is making patterns with thickened dye on the screen and then printing it with other thickened dye or the thickener, so the pattern slowly breaks down. But I haven't used thickened dye in the same was as I'd use printing inks. Well, it's not the same way, because the consistency is different and the way the colours interact is more like over dyeing. Plenty of opportunity to make a mess..

Before our play day, I decided to  experiment with a product that my friend Kirry gave me. It's called Mask-Ease and you can see it here, as well as a stack of other places, including You Tube demonstrations. Basically, it's a system for putting a solid, reusable resist on a silk screen, without losing those pesky little bits or having to wash the screen for hours to remove it. I kept my design simple on purpose, because my paws don't always behave as they ought and part of the experiment was to see whether this process suited me.  The yellow medium is very soft but I still found cutting the stencil slightly challenging and it took me several sessions. But if you have paws that behave properly, it would be a breeze!

And transferring the image, which had those little fiddly bits was just fantastically easy. The whole process is way easier than most other methods, so I'll certainly use this when I want to print with little fiddly details.

Here's what the Mask-Ease looks like on the screen. (This was actually taken after printing, hence the green tinge to the screen from the dye). The design is repeat in both directions, so I can use it on a large piece of cloth.



 

First, I tried the screen on paper. Printing with thickened dye on paper is never as sharp, as with printing inks or other media, but I wanted to see what the design looked like.                                                                It's a stronger line that I'd usually use but it looks pretty much as I expected, since I was keeping the design simple. The blurriness is just from the dye pooling on the cartridge paper, as it's such a wet medium.

 

OK on to printing fabric. Part of the point of this play day for me was to explore how thickened dyes differ from printing inks. I printed with yellow mixed with the blue from the earlier print. I didn't tape or pin the fabric firmly, as I wanted to break up those areas of strong colour.

 

OK, that worked. But the areas of white bugged me, so I overprinted with yellow using another screen I created back here. It broke up the white but in retrospect, yellow wasn't a good colour to use. That's fine, that's what this is all about...

This will have a whole lot more happening to it, if it's going to be a useful piece of cloth. But then again it may just be a sample to experiment on..

Time was passing all too fast and I wanted to try out my other screen.

I made this one the night before, in front of the TV, using my wax screen resist from Batik Oetoro and a whole lot of bits and pieces like paper doilies, cotton reels, wooden craft shapes and the brush I keep for wax resist. Basically, I just stamped and painted around shapes and filled in with texture, all over the surface of the screen. It was more like we do for breakdown printing, but with the wax resist. Fun!

My first print as designed to be overprinted later, once it was dry, so I printed in yellow.

It's lovely and sharp, so you can really see how the screen looked, but it's fairly pale, of course.

 

For my second print, I added red to half the screen and allowed it to mix randomly with the yellow on the other half. I wanted to see how the colours blended, as this screen would also work for a larger piece of cloth with multiple repeats. I didn't allow myself to get distracted into printing yards of cloth though..

 

The screen was rather wet, by this stage, which makes me feel we need to thicken the medium rather more for this kind of printing. So I did two pulls to dry it out a bit.

 

They turned out as quite good prints too.

 

For my last experiment, I wanted to see what happens if you print wet on wet. You never do this with printing inks, but we've done it with breakdown printing and it goes back to my attempts to understand how dyed colours overlay each other and whether wet on wet is different to over dyeing later, after the first print has batched and been rinsed. First I printed in yellow, so it looked very much like the yellow print above. Then immediately, I moved the screen about 1cm offset and printed in orange. Then I turned the screen 180 degrees and printed in a magenta purple colour.

The colours interacted in interesting ways. Where the yellow and orange met, the yellow acted almost as a resist to the orange, pushing it out to the edges. When I printed with the purple, it turned brown in some places, as I expected, especially where the lines of colour were fine. But the orange and yellow also acted as a resist to the purple in places.While sometimes, the warm colours pushed the purple to the edge of the shape,in others, the purple actually over dyed the yellow. Frankly, it leaves me scratching my head (in a delighted kind of way). I've experienced this before with breakdown printing, with some colours resisting others, but that's such a harum scarum kind of printing process, it's hard to work out which colour is doing what!

 

As experiments go, it was a useful process and will be more so when I overprint the yellow piece and see how that differs. I can see that this kind of printing will be fabulous on my scarves and on large scale cloth prints. But I'm disappointed to see that, unless I get a whole lot better at predicting the interactions, I'm pretty much going to have to stick to printing inks on fabric, when I want a distinct outline in my colour layers and a lot of control.

 

Last of all, just for fun.. Maz brought along various print blocks and linocuts. She inherited this one from Mary Beeston (there's some pretty basic info here but just Google her) and it has seen hard use in its time.

It was one of three similar linocuts that belonged to Mary. I'm not sure what she did with them - images of her work are few and  far between on the net - but it was fun to print from one of her blocks.

 

Maz also brought along a tree stamp, because the girls from Fibrecircle are working on the theme of Trees in our sketchbooks this year. I used it to stamp some trees onto a paper background I'd created when we were drying off the second screen.

OK, that's going in the sketchbook!





Breakdown printing

Tricia and I had some more breakdown printing playdays. Tricia still had her second never-ending screen to print from, and both painted new screens. I wanted to try block printing with the thickened dyes onto fabric as a first layer.

I think I will print over these pieces to see how this influences the pattern.

I also painted two screens:







I used my Indian print blocks to print on this one, building up layers on the screen and letting them dry in between. The layers were very thin, compared to other methods I've used so they dried quite quickly. For the last layer, I used black thickened dye. The screens that have been so reluctant to break down were built up using this layering method, so I expected to produce a screen that would print quite well.









The results were mixed. The initial prints were very interesting but the screen discharged very quickly.







The strongest area of print is in the lower right corner, and it's certainly very interesting. But the dried media broke down very quickly.









My other screen was painted using more usual methods, using sponge brushes, syringes, stamped elements with plastic containers and thick drizzles spread with a comb. These are the techniques they used on the screens that were reluctant to discharge.









However, this screen also discharged very quickly.







The dye was slightly runnier than last time, because they had a problem with the screens clogging up. The humidity was slightly higher as well, and the screens did not sit unprinted for as many days. Clearly, there's a dynamic between all these things, determining the kind of results.









Meanwhile, Tricia was printing from her second never-ending screen.







She printed from it in various colourways.











Even washing the screen out between colours didn't cause it to break down...







...nor did using very runny media. The screen hasn't been washed out, since it's making such lovely patterns. The resist design looks more ragged each time, so it is finally beginning to break down.









Tricia also painted another larger screen.







Like my screens, it broke down quite quickly.











We're producing some beautiful fabrics, though, aren't we?

Three months of play

Wow, three months have flown by without me! I never really enjoy winter and I certainly don’t find it a hugely productive time. Everything just seems harder to achieve at this time of year. Although, it hasn’t been a total waste either.

Since I was last here, I’ve been doing more breakdown printing. I really enjoy this process and I feel I’m getting the hang of it now. These two below show the prepared screen before it was printed and then the resulting fabric, each about 2m x 1.4m.


Painted Screen

This screen was painted with a sponge brush, stamped with various circular objects like cotton reels, cups and circular sections of bubble wrap, and painted with a sponge brush in asterisks. 

Printed Fabric

The fabric really shows the breakdown process, with the distinctive circles being the last elements to break down on the left hand side.

The second screen was painted in uneven coloured stripes and then I drew an overall swirling pattern with a syringe.

Painted Screen

These thick swirls formed a strong resist at first (left hand side) and then began slowly to break down, yielding the same pattern in red. 

Printed fabric

I particularly like these fabrics because the breakdown process is so clear. In each case, the result is a fabric that I can see working well for a quilt, since they are each like three related fabrics.

The above screens broke down pretty much as you’d expect. However, some screens haven’t behaved the way I expected. Several screens simply would not break down, no matter how much we printed from them. I’m not sure if this was a function of moist weather and the consequent slow drying, being dried with a hair dryer, a longer delay between preparing screens and printing, slightly higher levels of urea in the chemical water or, most likely, a weird combination of any of these factors.

These three fabrics were printed from one of these Magic Pudding screens, painted by Tricia Smith. Each is only about ½ metre but I like the way they work together, almost like different colourways in a commercial fabric.

I also printed a silk scarf with a partly exhausted screen, and I absolutely adore the results! It’s become my favourite scarf.

The only disadvantage of the process is that it produces large quantities of printed fabric. My collection of breakdown printed fabrics is now quite extensive and it’s hard to work fast enough to take them a step further, into art pieces. Some are fairly ordinary pieces, so I’m beginning to experiment with discharging some of them. The results so far have been promising - stay tuned for more photos.