After many unsuccessful attempts at acetone transfer using black and white photocopies, I decided to go back to my usual practice of silk screen printing. I designed a collage in Photoshop using family holiday photographs taken during the 1960s on the North Wales coast, and recent photographs of wildflowers taken at the same location.
I wanted to use the collage as a repeat pattern to produce a final piece for my degree show. However whilst processing the collage I ran into a problem. The photographs in the background needed less exposure time on the ultraviolet light box than the photographs did. The attempts at arriving at an exposure time that would reveal all the images were useless and I went home from college frustrated.
After working at home I abandoned the idea of the collage in favour of a pattern I have been working with throughout this third year. The simple dress shapes I had arranged into a circle I used to cut out parts of the family photographs after I had grouped them together. Although this image is simple I feel it combines the memory of childhood holidays with simple dress shapes that combine to create a ‘floral’ pattern.
After making the three 2D dresses I feel that the only way for my ideas to move into the present is to create a 3D adult dress. The finished ‘floral’ pattern I will transfer to patterned paper that I will makeup into a dress, but the problem still remained as to how I will create the pattern on paper.
With three weeks to the degree show and one of those weeks is half term, I have less than two weeks to complete my final piece. The only solution I feel is left to me, is to take my design to a commercial printer and have it printed on a large format printer.
