Last print room session

After my last day in the print room, I have tied together all of my samples to collect a good body of work. As part of today I tried to fix a few samples which I felt didn't go so well to start with. I still don't think they are fixed but I have experimented to find out what does and doesn't work.

This print was supposed to look like leaves were falling, with the gradient background and the leaves getting bigger towards the bottom. Unfortunately there were quite a few smudges on the print so I added aquaspand leaves to try and distract from this. I think if done well this concept would be effective.

As previously mentioned, this sample didnt work for many reasons, so I  decided to try and add in some darker leaves  to the background. 

This sample was done from half of another sample. After cutting it in half, I painted on a beige pigment dye for the background and added some green leaves to see what effect it would have. I think its added to the print, and I definitely prefer the coloured background to the white one. I also think it represents my colour stripe more as a sample.

 I also started two new prints which are shown below. The left sample was an experiment because I painted reactive dyes directly onto the wet fabric to see what effect it would have. I am happy with the result because I think it represents the colours in an autumn tree which is exactly the effect I wanted, for this print and my whole project. The left print was my first attempt at monoprinting on my exposed screen. As it was my first go, I wasn't too sure what to expect but I did 3 attempts using the same painted screen. The first didn't come out properly, probably because the dye wasn't wet enough or there was too much of it, but the colour that did come out was nice and strong. The next two did come out properly but the colour gradually faded. I love the monoprinting technique and wish I had more time to experiment with it.

I have loved my time in the print room, and I had lots more ideas that I didn't have the chance to develop. This included painting on an open screen because there were none available to paint on, and placing things like doilies, lace and thread under my screen before printing to see what effect it would have on my prints. This would have worked particularly well on my birds due to the density of colour. It also would have linked really well to my sketchbook as some of them were worked into with pattern when I was doing my research.