And some other things...

Cindy has made some new pages for the book she began in the Ro Bruhn workshop back here.

 
She collected together small embroideries and similar little samples and incorporated them into her pages....

 ... adding buttons, lace, fabric snippets on painted backgrounds with hand stitch.

It's going to be beautiful when it's finished!

Helen also brought along another book she'd made. She's on a roll - this is the third she's made since we started the cereal box books.

This one is a kind of magic book. The front butterfly fold is purely decorative but once the cover is opened...

 ... there is a hidden narrow book that opens to the left...

 
... while the right opening reveals the main book.

 

Helen was working on another embroidery while we were all spraying colours.

 

I can't tell you what it's about, because it's super secret stuff. You may hear more about it later!

 

Nola had some dye printing to show us, this one on paper...

... and these on quilters' muslin.



 

Interesting! 



Print Gocco

I'm falling seriously behind on my blog updates! So much to do, so little time. Our first July meeting experiments were with Print Gocco. Some of us had used the Gocco machines before but for most, it was a new experience. So most of our printing samples were just to show the process.

We had three machines between seven of us, so inevitably the process was slow. We all had a chance to print onto paper and fabric.

First, Nola did a brief demonstration of the process. Print Gocco is a simplified screen printing method. The screens are prepared by imprinting a carbon-based master onto the screens using flash bulbs. The same machine can be used for printing, replacing a squeegee in normal screen printing, or the inked screen can be mounted onto a hand stamper. The screens we printed were B6, so using the hand stamper is more useful for larger sheets of paper or fabric, and the machine is better for small products, like cards.

The whole process is incredibly easy to do. New flash bulbs are inserted in the flash unit.

Preparing to make the screen from the master

The carbon-based master is placed on the flatbed of the machine, and the blank screen is inserted into the unit, matching arrows, and ensuring the screen side is closest to the master.

Placing the screen in the machine

The flash unit is placed on the outside, again matching arrows, and the top is closed down firmly. The bulbs flash and the carbon-based master is imprinted onto the screen.

To print, ink is drizzled onto the screen, between the plastic backing and the screen, and the plastic is laid back over the screen.

Inked screen in the machine

The screen is inserted back into the machine, the item to be printed is laid where the master was, and the cover closed again, forcing the ink through the screen onto the print surface.

Printing

Printed image

Similarly, the screen can be placed into the hand stamper, and the screen printed by manual pressure onto yardage, larger sheets of paper or other materials. 

Helen's prints from the same screen

Here's Prue printing from the same screen. She printed a series of pages with the image.

Beverley made this screen and printed with a metallic ink.

Here are Maz and Nola setting up to print from Maz's screen. The mmaster was a pencil drawing, based on designs in her sketchbook. Maz has a sheer fabric, like an organza, which is laid on top of Nola's cream quilter's muslin.

Maz is inking the screen for printing. She laid down some blue and green inks next to one an other, and mixed the blue and green together on a palette to achieve some blending. Gocco inks generally don't blend, if just laid down side by side.

You may be able to see the different coloured inks on the screen. The screen is mounted in the stamping unit, which has four small springy feet, visible around the edges of the screen.

The printed image looks blurry because it is actually two layers of fabric.

The image was stamped fairly regularly over the surface of the fabrics.

This is Nola's fabric, which was layered underneath. There are slight changes in the design, where the fibres of the organza acted as a slight resist.

The print images are wonderfully clear and the process is simple. It’s a great way to print exact multiples of an image. There are some disadvantages to the process, however. There seems to be some doubt about whether the process will continue to be supported, especially these older B6 machines. However there seem to be new models of the machine available, including one at B5, which would be a more useful size. We managed to buy supplies from Eckersleys without any problems, and there are other Australia suppliers online, notably NEHOC in Sydney. It’s possible to buy the screening material by the yard, now, so theoretically, if the B screens are no longer supported, you could make your own. Nola bought some screening to try, but it wasn’t used in our session.

As printing goes, it’s an expensive method. The screens are expensive, the bulbs are expensive and single use, and the inks are expensive. Most of all, the machines are expensive. A new machine with a few screens and other materials was listed online at $289. Making a single screen and printing a single run of multiples from it came to about $10. A long run would be more expensive as it would use more inks.

The requirement that the master be carbon-based is trickier these days. The system was invented when photocopiers were carbon (toner) based. Nowadays, photocopiers don’t use toner, they are more like inkjet printers and the inks aren’t carbon-based. We had access to an older toner-based photocopier, which simplified matters, and members drew their own designs in 2B or heavier lead pencil or coloured over their inkjet designs with the special Riso Pens. One member had access to a laser printer as prints from that are carbon-based. Charcoal pencils also work. But some thought has to go into the medium used on the master.

It’s a fun and simple method of making multiple prints. We didn’t explore any of the many possibilities in our session. For example, theoretically, a coloured image could be separated into colour layers in a graphics program, the individual layers switched to greyscale and printed as masters on a laser printer. The three layers could be created as individual screens and three print runs in different colours onto a single work might yield a coloured print. It wouldn’t be a photographic print, but manipulating the colours could result in an interesting series of similar prints. The print structure of Gocco makes problems of register (getting the second and third prints in exactly the same position to avoid blurring) much simpler. Similarly, you can over-print a primary print with a second different screen. You could over-print the primary with the same screen in a different colour, deliberately offsetting the second image. As a tool, it has a lot of possibilities for the textile artist, and it’s just as easy for the Scout group to print t-shirts for their camp. Assuming the materials continue to be available!

While we were playing with Gocco, Carol was playing with another kind of printing. She wanted a simple printing method to use with her group of Joey scouts. She mounted a sheer curtain fabric between card to make a simple screen. Then she mounted a fine sticker of a butterfly onto the screen. She painted over the screen with PVA glue and allowed it to dry. Then she peeled off the sticker and, using a piece of card as a squeegee and Permaset printing ink, printed the image. 

The image looked a little ragged, so Carol tried with the Gocco inks, which are a finer medium, since the Gocco screens are finer than most silk screens. The result was  much clearer. 

Isn't that amazing? You can make prints like this with the most basic of materials!

Abstracting from photos

Our second March meeting was a small one. I think perhaps the topic scared some people away! We did some drawing exercises, working from photos to create abstract images. Only three of us did the exercises and one is too embarrassed by her work to share it. I think we all know how that feels.


Nola drew up an activity sheet, with some thoughts about abstraction and some drawing tasks. The tasks were pretty easy ones, since drawing is so scary for many people. There was no central organisation: people just worked on whichever exercises interested them.

Here’s one way of thinking about Abstract vs Non-Objective shapes:
Abstract shapes share a relationship with a realistic object. A shape can be various levels of abstractions, from almost representational through to barely representational at all. Non-objective shapes have no connection to a representative shape, though they may be inspired by a shape, colour or mood. We’re working with abstracting – i.e. we began with a photo of something specific.

Before you start drawing, you could consider some basic design elements.
• Decide whether you are working in portrait or landscape. You don’t have to use the same orientation as your photo or even the same orientation each time.
• Choose a focal point for your design. High on the page, low on the page; central or offset.
• What movement might you want in your drawing? Horizontal movement is calm and restful, vertical movement suggests growth and change.
• How will balance feature in your design? Balance has a strong influence on the mood of a composition. Designs with symmetrical balance or repeated similar shapes, colours, tones, lines are stable, calm, even rigid, and can organise many busy elements. Informal or asymmetrical balanced designs have dissimilar shapes, with unequal visual weight, which can feel casual or natural, or even unsettled. Circular or radial balance from the centre of a composition feels stable, while the same kind of balance from an offset point feels informal or unsettling. “Crystallographic” balance uses all-over pattern without a focal point, with equal emphasis over the whole composition, and a balance between positive and negative space.

Shape exercises:
1. Draw or trace outlines of shapes from your photo, without any interior details.
• Isolate one shape and doodle it into something else, by adding more exterior lines
• Isolate one shape and repeat it in a pattern. Make your pattern dense. Draw it again with a less dense layout.
• Mirror your shape.(If you don’t have confidence in your drawing skills and you don’t want to fold your paper, you can do this by holding the paper up to the window and tracing it onto the back of your sheet, tracing this copy onto another sheet and then tracing from that one onto the front side of your paper.)
• Rotate the shape
• Draw the shape as a circular repeat
2. Look at where the light falls on the main shapes in your photo. Draw contour lines to show the brightest areas and the darkest areas. (Can’t see it? Try squinting – it often helps to see tonal values. It’s also easier to see on a black and white image.) Make sure your contours are whole shapes, not just lines. Erase any lines that are not shapes. Play with your contour shapes – pattern them, colour them, interlock them.
3. Look at the negative space in your photo. Draw or trace these shapes a couple of times
• Pattern the shapes with doodles.
• Colour the negative space. One colour? Adjacent colours on the colour wheel? Will your shapes have an outline (which brings back the object more)?
• Use the same shape, without a strong outline, and add outlines in successive colours or tones to make contours in the negative shapes. Try different shaped outlines – ones that mimic the shape, ones that accentuate it, ones that are unrelated to the shape.
4. Use the dominant lines in your photo to make geometric shapes
• Look at where the strongest lines are on your image. Draw these on a piece of paper.
• Turn the lines into geometric planes.
• Add colour to the planes
5. Silhouettes – use the shapes from an image as silhouettes against a different background. Doodle a patterned background or use one of your earlier pages. Make your silhouette dark to contrast with a lighter, more open background. Try a light silhouette against a denser, darker patterned background.
Scale:
1. Focus on a small part of your image. Draw it in large scale, taking up the whole page. Don’t worry too much if your shape isn’t exact.
• Add pattern elements within the shapes.
• Experiment with different patterns – swirling and geometric, patterns that mimic the overall shape, patterns that contrast, small patterns and larger ones.
2. Use the shapes of your image and miniaturise them.
• Repeat the shapes in a regular pattern.
• Repeat the shapes in an irregular pattern.
• Experiment with closer and further apart spacing.
Colour:
1. Using some of your earlier shapes, work with unexpected colours. Try to establish a specific mood – excited, sombre, spooky…
2. Try shading colours from one to another.
3. Use different tones of a hue to suggest depth, but in a different way to the shades in your photo.

Nola worked from this photo:

The obvious element was the flower shape.

First she drew the outline and doodled it into a butterfly.

“This was really a warm-up exercise, just to get my head into a drawing place.”

Then, with two L-shaped scraps of paper, she isolated a small part of the photo...

… and drew the main design lines. Then she extended the design lines beyond the original shape (marked with a rectangle) and added some internal lines and pattern.

This one took elements from this image and rotated them around a central point. It still looks very flower-like, though. Interesting twist happening...

This one was from the contoured activity, using the original base shape, but the image was quite small and it was too hard to work with.

"I can see this has possibilities,  drawn larger and with the original lines removed."
This one uses the negative shapes around the original flower shape.

"They all look like weird bats! But interesting shapes..."

“This one was colouring contour lines and it’s pretty uninteresting. None of my drawings will set the world on fire, but it was a fun exercise and gave me some interesting things to think about.” Maz's drawing to follow...
Show and tell:
Meanwhile our members have been abstracting in other ways.
Maz took a class in screen printing with Marie-Therese Wisniozski and she brought her class work to show us. Her first prints were made using a circle, which was torn apart and used as positive and negative screen stencils.

"These were really to get us used to the process of printing."
Each student had taken along a prepared stencil. Maz’s was based on a garbage bin design she had done previously. Isn't it fascinating how the most mundane things give really interesting patterns? She pulled repeat screens, putting two colours, blue and green, in the well and allowing them to mix as she pulled the print.

In this print, she printed the screen area in black several times, and allowed it to dry. Then she positioned a simple stencil on the screen over the top and pulled prints with several colours in the well, allowing them to blend.

This screen used torn pieces of masking tape as the stencil. The lower sample was printed several times with the same screen and different colours.

This sample used multiple layers of screens – first without a stencil, then with positive and negative versions of the same few stencils. Some printing inks were opaque, so they were unaffected by the colours underneath, while others were transparent and changed according to the colour previously printed.

Isn’t it wonderful? Maz really recommends Marie-Therese as a tutor! You can see how she built up the complexity of the tasks, until, by the end, the students were making really complex pieces of printed cloth.

Meanwhile, Beverley took a dyeing workshop - pictures please, Beverley? (Since our official photographer was too busy admiring them!) Tricia was working with pattern of a different kind with her beautiful crochet scarf.

Can you see the way the colour of the variegated yarn works perfectly with the design?

Our next meeting will be delayed by Fibre Forum at Orange. Expect to see the results of wonderful workshops here, after April 19.