Mix it up :)

So a change is often good yeah?

YES.

For a good three and half years of my university course every single piece of printed fabric I created started from a hand drawn piece of work. Sketching, scanning, painting, endless photocopying, editing and screenprinting. Hours were spent mixing colours in the dye lab. Drop a sugar grain of colour pigment too much into your colour mix and you might as well start again! Then when your exposed screen is ready it has marks on...imperfections that you just don't want on a sharp, edgy, clean pattern. So you spend an hour or so tilting your screen in the sunlight checking for unwanted marks, using masking tape or tippex to get rid of them. You finally print the screen onto your fabric and your colour doesn't come out as hoped or your colour separations don't match up! It can take numerous attempts before you're finally happy.

Now don't get me wrong, I love screenprinting...it is extremely fun and you can achieve something that you would never achieve with digital printing. Sometimes imperfections are good, a little quirk here and there can make things more exciting. However, with about three months until the end of my degree I realised I wasn't achieving everything that I wanted to with just screenprinting alone. I wanted to use fabrics which didn't work particularly well with screenprinting. So the choice was to take a huge risk and place the weight of my final degree project onto digital printing meaning I would need to learn the basics of Photoshop very quickly. There was no chance to spend a little time checking how the print worked on various fabrics, as the fabric needed to be ordered and the prints needed to be sent to the several printers I was using at each end of the country six weeks before the final deadline, and that was pushing it. You must consider that there aren't many fabric printers that exist, certain printers only print on certain fabrics, some will refuse to print on any fabrics apart from ones which you purchase from them and most importantly every other fashion/printed textile student in the country is also wanting their work printed in time for final hand in dates. Apart from these issues you will probably come across your own...
1. You realise that printing companies are also busy at this time of the year printing mass orders for high street stores and high end designers. These people come first, they order an incredible amount more and they pay an incredible amount more. Students only spend £500 - a grand here and there.
2. There can be delays due to numerous reasons.
3. The printers can make mistakes and very costly ones! Such as not reading the sizing instruction papers that they require you to fill out. Believing it to be normal when a good 30-40cm of the print has been cut off the top of a print. My advice is not to send your work to another university print studio to be printed. Their own students work is priority, remember they are your competition at the London graduate shows...graduate fashion week, new designers...
4. Machinery breaks - fact of life.

After the many obstacles even the most organised individuals will come across, it worked. I pretty much achieved what I wanted and maybe more. All stories have a happy ending, the endless sleepless nights, the endless amounts of money, the learning, the stress and tears were all worth it. I surprised myself in the end getting a first, something I never ever thought I could achieve.

I guess after all of this my point is that change can be good. Sometimes sticking to what you know is good, sometimes that works. But at the same time you must remember that if you don't experiment with what you don't know, then how will you ever know that it is not also good or even better? Try different things, different processes, different means, have variety.

After becoming much more comfortable with Photoshop and not a great deal of room to handle the process and mess of screenprinting, Photoshop then became my primary way of designing until about four days ago that was. Giuseppe mentioned that I should be using Illustrator for what I was designing, as it is a vector programme. For those of you reading this that don't know me Giuseppe is my boyfriend who studied multimedia design, currently working on website design/programming and knows a lot about computer science, so he has excellent knowledge of what I should be using and how to do basically do anything I need to on programmes I use...definately better than the best book about. Anyways vector graphics is the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygons, which are all based on mathematical equations, to represent images in computer graphics. This type of programme has many advantages, the main one being that images can be resized and magnified without losing quality. Whereas Photoshop uses raster graphics which is a data structure representing a generally rectangular grid of pixels, or points of colour. They cannot scale up to an arbitrary resolution without loss of apparent quality, which really is a problem for me.

Adobe Illustrator was something I merely used for technical garment drawings, so other than using the pen tool I was pretty uncomfortable using it. But a few hours learning can create hours of saved editing. Perfecting lines and matching up imagery becomes unnecessary with Illustrator, for my type of designs the majority of editing becomes little or non existent.

So after not changing my design process from Photoshop to Illustrator, but learning to work between them both, the past two days I have begun by creating my personal libraries of swatches in Illustrator. A collection of swatches of basic lines, shapes and imagery that may become useful when designing. It means that if I want some polka dots or stripes of varying sizes, colours and arrangements, I already have some available to use rather than starting from scratch. I would suggest this to anyone working with prints and patterns for clothing, homeware, etc. You might even surprise yourself with things you may not normally create. After just a few days of clicking away and getting to know the tools I feel much more happier using this programme.

If you made it down to here well done :) Here's a few a snippets of my swatches...

So remember to mix it up :)

Much Love
Elaine
X