Audience. Whats' Important To Them?

Another reason for trying different techniques in print and also looking into digital print, is too compare the traditional and digital, but also to see whether my audience have a preference on which is better or what they prefer in a wallpaper/general image. 

How people respond to your work through how it's presented/printed is possibly most important as this is what leads work to sell. Like I talked about quality before, I want to produce work/print and digital print and show it to others, getting their opinions and reasoning for why they really prefer a certain style to another. 

Plus...I've been looking into and talking to some people, that embrace Eco-friendly products. Is this important to a lot of people nowadays or just a small population of my audience?

This is a website called... 'EcoCentric'...producing Ethical & Eco Friendly Homewares & Gifts.

 http://www.ecocentric.co.uk/acatalog/About_Us_about_EcoCentric.html

This is a link to the site and what they aim to do.

They have an eco friendly wallpaper section. Now only are they all enviromentally sound, but several have been hand-printed or hand-finished.

Workshop. Designing For Print.

Throughout this workshop Mike also spoke a lot about Spot and Pantone colours. This answered questions i had about commercial and industrial printing and technique.

PANTONE is the most common colour referencing system in the UK and Europe. The company, produce what are called 'spot colours' to print studios. The 'spot colours' are ready mixed colours with reference codes, saving both money and time when printing. These ready mixed colours allow you too print solid colours in one single transition. This is why when we screen-print a photo we must change the image to CMYK and seperate them. CMYK, is ink being physically mixed on the paper. 

Mike also spoke about how this enables you to easily use metallic inks and varnishes to your work.  

This a pantones chart...

Handprinted Wallpaper?

This is a pleasant little website, for a handprinted wallpaper manufacturors called Cole and Son.

http://www.cole-and-son.com/collection_detail.asp?CollectionID=14

There is also this website, belonging to Deborah Bowness, who handprints her own wallpaper. Not only do I think her wallpaper is pretty cool, I also love the design of her website and would like to take ideas for this to my own website in the future. This is the opening page for the website online...

http://www.deborahbowness.com/wallpapercollection.html\

She has a really different approach to designing wallpapers, and does it with everyday objects...

Prep of images for Screen PRINT.

Well today I have realized that it would have probably been easier to actually create a new wallpaper design than try and struggle with an old image I did a couple of months back...

When i created the Barbie heads piece for my fmp my idea for it was wallpaper or a wrapping paper. So i was eager to use it in this project and try all the different print techniques with it, then to compare and contrast the different print styles easily with one image.

However when I got the image up its been hard and such an arse to try and separate the image into layers for screenprint. I had to start the image off from scratch and then there seemed to be no easy way of creating the colour layer underneath than selecting tee-dious areas and then filling them.

In the coming week I now hope to produce some new work... but use the Barbie image to an extent.

However... These are the layers, ready to be exposed on on the screen for screen print. The images have to be black otherwise the screen wont pick it up as well. Greys wont be strong enough...

Underneath... >

On top...>

Workshop. Designing For Print.

This afternoon has been really useful in prep for screen print and also commercial print...AND confusing.

For print it's all about creating layers and positives. Split up into channels CMYK...Cyan, magenta, black and yellow. This seemed most applicable for photos though.

Process Colours.

Spot Colours - In commercial printing it can be cheaper to use ( if you only have a couple of colours). Corporate logos all have spot colour references. By double clicking on SWATCH in illustrator you can change it to process or spot colour. For screen printing change it to Spot colour.

For these positives for screenprint, you print them off black and white 1. Output 2. Mode - Seperations (HB). Name the positives so you know when you go to screen-print (in photoshop these come up if you select labels and crop marks).

INDESIGN> Choose process or spot. Pantone folder.

PHOTOSHOP> Image - mode - Pantone solid coated. Go to print...colour handling...serperations options there.

This is an image to test the seperations and print them to show what to print.

Here are the Seperations which are printed out...

I practiced with a photo which i shall hopefully print, or possibly use somebodies photography in the photography group. In order to produce these separations your image must be in the CMYK mode.

Time to hit the books!

A little trip to the library today came to a close with a very heavy and uncomfortable walk home...

Although i was looking for 'print' research, I stumbled across some interesting looking books on Wallpapers which will aid me in understanding it better and how its produced. In the main college building there really werent any grippingly exciting print books. Was a disapointment... I shall take a look in Vernon Street.

The Cutting Edge Of Wallpaper (2006) - Black Dog Publishing.

Print room...Mono-Print.

Today I went in to do screen printing.. however there were lots of us there and so preparing the screens for print took a while with a long que. Speaking to Mick, we asked if we could possibly try another print technique and so today I learnt lots about Mono-print and found out that it wasnt really for me...As far as I could see there isn't actually a recorded history of the origin of mono-printing, but they can trace early stages in which the proofing of intaglio prints can be associated to today's method of producing a mono-print.It seems that one of the early artists who experimented with printing in color, on unusual papers (and linen), and with odd horizontal formats to emphasize the horizon, was a Dutch painter and etcher of stark, fantastic landscapes called Hercules Seghers (1589-1638).

Hercules Seghers The Enclosed Valley. 1620's. Etching with washes

Most of his images differ widely from impression to impression, and most are preserved in only a few sheets. His eccentric and irregular linework of short strokes is matched by the non-Dutch topography of his subjects. His etchings belong to the most original and impressive experiments in the history of printmaking. Not only did he use different-coloured inks and often printed on coloured or dyed paper, but the diversity of individual prints was increased by his adding accents by hand. Seghers/' paintings are rare; few are documented, a

nd many forgeries exist. Rembrandt owned

 several of his paintings and was obviously influenced by his landscapes.

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) worked independently developing his own unique technique called trace monotype. His method consists of inking a sheet of paper, laying another sheet over it, and drawing on the fresh paper which received the ink in a linear manner.

Paul Klee (1879-1940) used and developed this method a few years later for his intriguing drawings. This seems very similar to the mono-printing of today.

In the workshop today we learnt what you can do with mono-print, and what the process is. You ink up a surface (we used acrylic), then to either cut out shapes or draw onto the ink and then put itthrough the press. The shapes cr eate the negative image...as you can see below.

Oh dear! This was the first mono-print i tried and it went horribly wrong. I disliked it so much that i stuck a couple of bits onto it.

When using cut out type shapes you must remember that it's reverse!

This was when I'd actually put the letters the correct way round!

This was done my drawing into the ink with a sharp edged object before putting it through the press.

Although it was pretty fun to do, I felt like I was back school, and the images that were produced and that I produced felt a little child-like. Perhaps this was because I didnt really know what i was doing. I didn't like not knowing what was actually going to be on my paper after printing it. I feel that for a certain project or an image with a certain subject it would be good to use, but i don't feel that any of the work i produce or will produce and especially not for wallpaper, that it would be appropriate to use. From exploring wallpaper, the repeat pattern and style is very structured and tidy, and i feel that you cant achieve this through mono-print.