screens

Shirts

Tuesday 5/25/10

Today was the last day of this project. I started it off by laying out all of my t-shirts with my teacher and taking pictures of all of them together. This was cool because it really showed the project and work that I did altogether as a whole. I had been taking pictures of individual shirts for the blog, but it looks much better when they are all together. We then took a few pictures of all my remaining screens. After this, the rest of the day was filled by cleaning and recycling the last twenty of my screens. This took a very long time. There are a lot of steps that it takes to complete this process. It is not very fun work, but It had to be done. I am now finished with my senior project and it feels great. Throughout these 2 and a half weeks I made 15 original designs, printed 11 of these designs to vellum, burned 24 screens, and printed 38 t-shirts of the 11 designs that I liked best.

new shirts

Front



Back

monday 5/24/10

Today was my last day to print shirts. I printed two more designs onto 10 more t-shirts. One of the designs was a simple one color design, so that was an easy and quick shirt to print. However, my last design was a three color design so that took a lot of work to line up. This one was particularly detailed so it was especially hard to get lined up correctly. There were also two designs on this shirt, so after I was done printing the first one, I had to go back set up another screen and print onto 6 t-shirts one more time. I also got a head start on cleaning and recycling all of my screens, which is what I am going to have to do all day tomorrow. I was able to get this over with for three of my screens, but that means I still have more than twenty to do tomorrow.

Weekly reflection

This week was a great week in the graphics room. The first week was very productive, but not as rewarding because I had no finished products. This week I was able to surpass my goal of making 7 different designs into t-shirts, which is what i thought I would be able to make and what I wrote on my proposal, and I already have made 9 different designs into shirts. I am very satisfied with how all of my designs came out. Most of them surprised me at how much better they look on shirts than they did on printer paper. I was able to make multiple of every shirt and I now have a stack of 26 finished t-shirts and one sweatshirt. I also have all the screens burnt for two more designs that should be able to turn into t-shirts on monday. However, at least one of the screens for each design has a problem with it so I am nervous as to how they might affect the shirts.
This week was full of much more labor than the first one. Most of my time the first week was spent sitting in front of a computer making a collection of designs. But this week I was finished designing for the most part (I still needed to make minor changes on some designs, but no completely new ones), and my time was spent, burning, spraying, taping, stretching, coating, recycling, lining up screens, and printing them. most of this work is not as fun as designing, but it is more rewarding. Every step takes you one step closer to the satisfaction of a final product and the capability of wearing your own art.
These steps all have a significant amount of room for error. While most of it went flawlessly, I definitely ran into my fair share of frustration. However, most of these problems had relatively simple solutions and provided me with more learning experience. While it was obnoxious at the time, I am thankful for these issues because now I am aware of those possibilities and the solutions necessary to make the best of them.

New shirts