Screen Printed Collection

This project was completed while studying Cert IV in Textile Design & Technology at RMIT

The brief was to create a collection of screen printed textile swatches.
I chose to create a fun and playful botanical inspired collection of designs.

Mood Board

I was inspired by loosely painted floral artworks including artworks by artist & designer Vera Neumann.

The brief was open in terms of style, we were limited to 8 colours and had to complete at least 10 printed A4 swatches of our designs.

Colour Swatches

Working in the print studio at RMIT I went through the process of mixing pigments to create the desired colours for my collection.

The design did not need to be in repeat, but it required making multiple screens where the designs linked up or overlapped in a way to make the design more dynamic or even to create extra colours by overlapping printed layers.

Development

I wanted my work to have a hand painted texture, so I painted many pages of floral shapes as well as textures in black, as the artwork needed to be 100% black to expose onto the mesh screens.

I then scanned the painted shapes so I could edit and experiment with them in photoshop. from here I made a plan by layering designs in illustrator using the multiply tool which helped to choose colour and print combinations speeding up the process in the print studio.

There were still a few test prints (above) that didn’t turn out exactly as expected.
This is only to show the experimentation process of screen printing, in the end I found some of my more successful prints were the ones with only 2-3 layers of printing, while some 4 layered prints worked well, more often than not, less was more.