January 21, 2013

Screen printing for Date's coat symbol pt.1

I've spent a long time on trying to find a good game reference of Masamune Date that would show the symbol on the upper back of his battle coat clearly. Not so long ago I managed to find a nice picture on deviantArt that showed the Sengoku Basara game model Date seen from the front, back and a head close-up. It was of immense help.. references like these are a godsend for cosplayers.

http://lezisell.deviantart.com/art/Sengoku-Basara-3-Masamune-Date-p1-fully-poseable-336345938
So to get a good view on that back symbol I had to crop that part specifically and then resize it bigger. Making something bigger also kinda drops the quality of it.. or well.. not sure what to call it but it doesn't get prettier or easier to see what exactly is on it. lol

Because this is a part of my "projektarbete", that I can do as an art task in my art course, why not do it? It's like killing two birds with one stone. Also school has some nice stuff for fabric printing that I do not have at home.. namely the materials needed for screen printing.

Okay, so during art class last week my teacher helped me to print out the coat symbol on an A4 paper. I thought at first A4 would be too small but upon further examination it seems to work okay. Although I will need to transfer over the symbol from that A4 print to an A3 to fill in some few parts of it that got left out when printing it out from the computer because of a lack of space.
   I would need to trace the symbol over to an A3 and at first I thought I could just put the A3 paper on top of it and trace it window style but lolnope.. I could hardly see the symbol under it at all. Too dark and it was hard to see what was blue and what was white and where they met when there was a paper on top. So what to do? Take a black marker and draw out all the lines. Life made 20% easier.

After I had drawn out all lines with marker
(lol the tape is still on, I just ripped it off temporarily from the A3)
After that I traced it again by using the window as a sort of "lightboard". Worked surprisingly well seeing it was still dark outside... art class is first lesson on the morning and during winter time it's dark. I did a fail though, at first I traced the symbol onto the backside of the A4... lol. At least I noticed pretty quickly and turned the whole thing around. After I had traced it down on the A3 using a pencil my teacher explained how the screen printing works. Sure I had done it once before.. but it was like 3 years ago so I didn't really remember much. But upon seeing a screen print frame, which still had someone else's art on it, reminded me of how it worked; everything that is transparent on the frame will be where there will be paint. The blue-green parts are like a sort of "hard filter" or something that blocks the paint and will therefore stay the fabric's color.

The example frame that still had a design on it..
Okay, so everything that I want white on my Masamune coat symbol will have to be colored black/dark? Sure, give me some markers!
...
......
A lot of minutes and neck pain (and annoying markers that color inconsistently) later I had this:


And with that the art class had ended for me. More about this next week.
Unless I continue with my landscape oil painting...

5 comments:

  1. Screen printing <3 =D Oh I miss doing that, it is so much fun <3 I hope it will got perfect for you when it is done. I remember last time I did Screen printing. That drawing I did, almost got kill me. When I was almost done with the painting, then I saw I did have fill some part of my painting wrong, and got to redo everything. Fun times, but that drawing is one of my fave for now.

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  2. Näyttää todella mahtavalta! Screen printing on ehkä paras tapa tehdä kuvioita. Hienoa, että sait tuollaisen tilaisuuden, koska seulalla saa todella siistiä jälkeä.

    Masamunesi edistyy huimaa tahtia! Tuskin maltan odottaa että saat sen valmiiksi~.

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  3. Ah, shit markers, what a pain... But it looks really good, I hope it'll work when you print it ~

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  4. Oh fun! Re-creating symbols and designs for cosplay is tedious. xD (I would know after having to create several different ones for my Asch the Bloody cosplay.) Can't say I have ever done screen printing per se, so it is interesting seeing you work through this process. :) Hope you nail the print on your first try!

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  5. joku sentää jaksaa panostaa. ite olisn varmaa lakanu suoraan kankaaseen piirtää lyijukunällä lopullista kuvaa et se on sinne suuntaan ja värit sitte päälle XD

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