Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Using Photoshop and printing onto fabric

I have been playing around with trying to get images onto fabric, using the bubble jet printer and some of my photos.  This has been partly inspired by the AusNZ Art Quilt online group's challenge, which is to make 12" square art quilts designed with a country other than Australia in mind.  The challenge will be on show at the Australian Quilt Convention soon.
I am not sure I am going to get my work done in time but I have been quite inspired to look at some of my photos and think about how I could use them.

I tried using treated cotton and that turned out ok, a bit duller than I had hoped.  I played around with two photos I had, one from France and one playing around with the shutter speed and making the lights blur.


Here is one version.  Unfortunately, I didn't realise that the purple colour was on a separate layer and it didn't print.  As the fabric is not that cheap, and I didn't have much, I decided not to worry.  I just used the one I printed out.
I used the Liquefy tool (under Filter) to play around with the lights.

I spent so much time getting the layers right and trying to intensify the colours that I forgot all I know about quilting and didn't make the quilt top the correct size.  So I have been fiddling around trying to make it 12" square.  Using an A4 printer makes it tricky getting the image large enough. 


Due to my somewhat messy file saving, I can't find the actual image I printed.  But here is a photo of the finished product.   As you can see, the colours are quite muted compared to the photos.  A problem with printing on fabric that has such a different texture to paper - and to the monitor.  Something I will have to adjust to I suppose.

I was looking up how to spell gryphon and found that I wanted to type in griffin.  Strange, I had been writing gryphon but just had to type griffin.  Both seem to be correct. 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love your result! It's interesting how one can develop those ideas.
Some programs have a chart on how to adjust the monitor colours to the printer colours, but considering that fabric reacts differently, - I am not sure if that is really a help - though you might be able to follow the idea up and tweak things when you have less expensive fabric to try it out on.Oh! does every fabric react differently ? - I don't think I've been much help, sigh! Still I think your result very pleasing!

Mary said...

Thanks Vera, that's about how I feel about it all! I will continue to try things out. I have bought some liquid that I am supposed to soak my fabric in, that could be cheaper, I hope.