Project 5

Project 5 Painting and printing

Stage 1 & 2

I spent an hour looking though all my fabric and deciding which were best fitted to my designs that I was planning on doing. Most of the fabrics were plain, tones of cream, grey and green. I also chose black and red. I chose all sorts of fabric types from muslin, hessian, calico and cottons to see what happened when they were printed on.

I then chose 4 designs that I felt worked and then looked at them to come up with a design that worked well on fabric.  I first chose the fern design and felt that a subtle print would work well for this design. I have two different designs for this, a block print and a stencil. I also like the geometric design with the line, circles and diamonds. I was looking through an African textile book that I got out of the library and this gave me a few ideas that I could use for the colours and design of this design. I loved the shades of browns and blues, and the respective block prints.

This lead me to design a block print out of lino using the shapes, here are some of the practicing:

I feel that some fabrics worked better than other, hessian was difficult to print on and muslin gave a grainy effect, the shiny fabric worked well, apart from it is on black so it is hard to see the design. The green on green fern design was far too subtle and I felt that I needed to take more time on this design to make it work. I felt that the geometric design was started to work how I wanted it to but it was still missing something, so I looked through Ruth Issett’s book again and realised that it was layers in colour that I was missing and went back and looked at my practice paper and fabric and design work and came up with a new idea using the lino blocks and roller and bits that I felt work from all of these.