Making Time

I always feel like I don't have time to design and feel bogged down by the less enjoyable tasks of running a small business. 

However, something I read recently really resonated with me: that we all have time to do things but instead choose to spend that time doing something else.

So today I'm not going to the studio and I'm going to ignore the mess in the house and will allocate today and tomorrow to working on a new fabric design. I've been up since dawn just sketching and am loving it. Seriously, I've forgotten how much I've missed it. 

The goal is to have a new fabric screen ready for my yardage printing class to print next week. There, I've put it out there.

Tsk Tsk is in the Studio

I was honoured to have the very talented Tiel Seivl-Keevers in my screen-printing class yesterday.  Tiel is an illustrator, fabric designer, soft toy-maker plus a young mother of two.  Tiel needed no introduction to screen-printing but wanted to refresh her skills to concentrate on fabric designs & prints this year.


 
These floral prints are an example of Tiel's unique style and you can see more of her work by checking out Tsk Tsk, her design company.



This beautiful white print was done on paper and only smudged a little because the screens (43T mesh) we were using were better suited for fabric.  Paper generally requires a finer mesh screen and poster ink.  However, you can successfully screen-print on more fibrous, hand-made paper with the fabric screens and Permaset Aqua inks.

Designing a Floral Fabric

Hand-printed fabrics is what Thea & Sami is mainly concentrating on this year.  Fabrics used will only be natural, organic or sustainable such as hemp that grows quickly and without the use of pesticides.

 

Over Christmas, I visited the inspiring Brisbane Botanic Gardens at Mt Coot-tha and took lots and lots of photos as a starting point for new fabric designs.

  

I have been dying to show you one of the upcoming fabric designs so this is part 1 of that.   As I can't catch up with all that I need to do, I contract out as many services as possible including having my screens professionally exposed for screen-printing.  The screen for this design will be ready at the end of the week so please follow the blog to see the final screen-printed result on fabric.



As I had time over the Christmas "break", I decided that I wanted to lay out this design manually and include some hand drawn elements.  This is laying out the design motifs developed in Photoshop  from the original two plants you see above.



I love this photo as it reminds me of those animated films where you would see the artist's hand intervening with the cartoon.  I am using a Zig Opaque Pen in red.  These pens are the best if you want to hand-draw your own film positives (needed to create a screen for printing) and are available in a variety of widths.

I am really excited about teaching the screen-printing workshops this year as many local designers have signed up for January and February.  I will be showing what we get up to in the classes and also finding out what else these wonderful people get up to, living creatively in Brisbane.