More from Design Class

Sunday, December 21, 2014

When I made the last piece for my challenge, I printed the girl and the background circle to fabric twice.  That was partly in case I messed up I would have an extra copy and partly to have two slightly different colorings.  I could decide which coloring I liked better with the challenge fabric after I saw how it printed out. 

It is not a perfect science getting your colors to print exactly as you see them on your computer screen.  The reason for this is that all computer screens can display colors slightly differently, and depending on the type of fabric you print to, the threads can absorb the colors differently. The other variable would be the printer itself. 

Just to get a little technical here, computer screens display colors in RGB format, which stands for Red, Green, and Blue.  Adding 100% of all three colors produces white light, whereas an absence of all three produces black.  CMYK format, which stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black is the color format used in the printing process.  In this format, the absence of all the colors produces white, and a combination of all the colors produces black.  This format works the opposite of RGB as it is a subtractive format.

The only way to be sure you get your colors the way you want would be to do a lot of experimenting with your colors and saturation levels  on the computer, documenting your settings, and doing a lot of test prints.  This can be very time consuming and costly as printing your own designs to fabric can be expensive.  I am unwilling to spend the extra time or money to do a lot of test printing.  I figure if the colors are not good enough for what I want, there is always paint and markers of which I am more than willing to use.

Having another piece to complete for my year of design class, I chose to use the extra copy of the girl I printed from my last piece.  By making a much smaller piece, I could 'zoom in' on the face and make it more of a portrait.  I used a piece of fabric that I marbled at one of my fiber art group meetings for the background and added some flowers and leaves that I cut out of some drapery fabric.  I like how the piece came out.  It reminds me of springtime.