Screen printing for Date's coat symbol pt.5

Yesterday I finally printed the symbol on the back of Date's coat in school. I won't go into details how the printing process works because I already explained that in part 4. I'll mostly just post photos this time and explain some things I didn't (have to) do when test printing.

Preparations..

Before printing I remember those little.. well, faults on the print frame which I didn't bother with while test printing but I wouldn't want them on the real deal. I first thought about handpainting carefully with a pencil over the frame and avoid the "leak points" but that would be more tedious than needed.. so the teacher said I could just cut super small tape strips and put them over to cover those "frame leaks".

Like this!

Next thing to do was to put the frame exactly where I wanted it. This took quite some time to get right because I kept getting confused where exactly the center point was.. and it didn't help that the symbol on the print frame itself was off-centered and I didn't notice that until later. Derp. Oh well, after measuring the distances all over the place with the measurement tape I was.. sort of.. confident it was in the center.

Center pleaseeeeeeeee

Then I just took some paint and the squeegee and.. ta-dah!

Sure I had my doubts the paint wouldn't stick because of this fabric's weird plastic-y surface and whatnot.. but it went okay. On the other half of the symbol's edges it looks like either the frame moved a tiny bit during the printing or that the fabric's surface doesn't take paint so well and it "flowed out" a little. I don't know how to explain that. xD But it looks fine unless you're looking at it from an ALMOSTINYOURFACE distance.

Next thing to do? You guessed it, make it dry quicker. Hair dryer to the rescue!

Drying drying..

Then I just took it home and today (Tuesday) I ironed it to set the symbol. Knowing that this fabric rolls up when heated I decided to put weights at both sides.. namely my Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable in their protective cases. lol

The last mission - setting the print.

With that the symbol is ready and I can get on with sewing the coat together, booyah! That sure will be interesting! But before that.. Närcon Vinter is coming up this weekend and I need to prepare for departure on Thursday. AAAWWWW YEEEEAAAA excitement!

Screen printing for Date's coat symbol pt.4

I should have written this already yesterday but I got home late and was tired as crap all day so.. lolnope. I will write it now instead but the actual process was done yesterday in school's art class. Oh, and excuse me most photos are a bit blurry...

Okay, so last time I said it's ready for test printing and this is what I did!
First up I cut out a fitting piece of black cotton fabric (from school) and then taped a piece of paper on the table where I would be printing to guard the table from.. well, getting paint on it. I used black fabric because then I could print with white fabric paint and that's better because Masamune's symbol is white.

cotton fabric and taped paper underneath

After that I put the fabric on top of the paper, stretched and taped it tightly along all corners. There was no iron in school so that was the only way to get the wrinkled fabric a bit less wrinkly lol. Oh, and obviously to hold it in place while printing.

Fabric taped in place

Okay, now ready for test printing! Here's the preparation and all items I would need. The white can is obviously fabric paint and those wooden things.. *googles* .. they seem to be called 'squeegee' in English. Sounds funny to me.. xD And then of course I'd need my printing frame.

Preparations complete

I took a spoon and put a row of paint at one of the edges of the frame...

The paint placed out (I used some extra.. you don't need that much)

And then took the squeegee and spread the paint so it fully covered the symbol.. wiped off the excess that was on top of the symbol and made sure there were no "paint lines". I left the remaining excess paint at the edge because I would be printing more than one.

It should look something like this..

When you lift the frame carefully the frame will look like this:

The symbol is almost transparent

I printed another symbol directly after the first. Can't wait too long between the prints or the fabric paint, especially the white for some reason, could clog up or something.. I'm not 100% sure of that but whatever. After the second test print my creations looked like this:

MAH BABIES 8DDDD

I had room to print a third one in the bottom center. Oh, and when test printing I put a paper on top of the already printed symbols so that the frame, complete with paint on it, wouldn't get on the already printed symbols. Then again if I were printing seriously (aka non-test) I would not do this because the paper catches up some of the paint of the already printed ones.. they don't dry in a second lol. If I wanted to print several ones close to one another I'd have to wait between each one so that the previous one would be dry. But yeah, because this was just a test to see that everything works as it should I did not care about slightly ruining my prints.

After printing the third symbol. Two previous ones still covered..

As you can see the printing is very exact and doesn't bleed or anything. Totally worth the extra effort at the start because after the printing frame is ready it's super chill; you could pretty much mass-produce almost perfect prints with little effort! Imagine how tedious it would be to handpaint each of these every time...

Oh, and after I had test printed enough I had to wash the frame. I used a sponge and just carefully rubbed the frame free of the paint under tap water. For some reason my tapes (which I put on earlier to conceal the holes) didn't peel off lol. I put it to dry in that same box I used earlier when developing the symbol with the water jet.

Drying drying.. (if you look close you can see the tapes on the other side)

And that's it. Next time I can print on the real thing!

Screen printing for Date's coat symbol pt.3

More progress on the screen printing!

Last time I finished all preparations needed for the symbol.. so now I had to get it over to the frame itself. I had kept the frame since last time, treated with photographic emulsion, in a dark room so it wouldn't get ruined by being exposed to light. Okay, so to get my chosen symbol traced over to the frame I put it next to the frame's "outside" (make sure the design will be the right way for how you want the final print to be on your fabric) and then put it inside an UV-light cabinet with a thick glass plate on top of it. I put my screen printing frame with the symbol transparent paper in there, put the UV-lights on, closet the doors and took time: 5 minutes.

UV-light cabinet (photo taken after I had removed my frame and lights were off)

After 5 minutes I took my frame out and it still looked totally... greenish. I couldn't see in the semi-darkness that anything had changed... except that not it wasn't light sensitive anymore. I held up the frame towards the door that was ajar (art classroom consists of two main rooms, I was in the non-main room were the heavier/special equipment is) and when I looked close enough I could see the symbol in a slightly fainter greenish shade along all the other... greens. Now to get it visible.. with the help of a high-pressure water jet thingy-whatever-it-is!

It looked like this ~

I put my screen printing frame into that.. err.. whatever it is called... to start "cleaning" my frame.. or well, to get the symbol visible. I find it a bit funny because that box I sprayed inside looked like something from a horror movie lol. I put earmuffs on because this water jet thingy makes very high sounds.

I just sprayed all over the frame in quick circle-ish motions.. making sure not to spray on the same place too long. I alternated the sides of the frame so that I would "clean" both sides evenly.

When I had sprayed once or twice.. you can see the symbol becoming visible (lighter green)

After I had sprayed more (notice the symbol turning transparent)

After I had sprayed enough to have the symbol turned fully transparent I took it out and attacked it with the blow dryer because.. well.. obviously it was soaking wet. I kept some distance with the blow-dryer, art teacher told me not to have it too close.

Speed drying for the win!

When my screen printing frame was dry I took it out into the light.. aka over to the main room of the art class. I taped around the frame's edges just to be sure of no paint leaking when printing.

Started reinforcing the edges with tape

I then held my frame up into the lights above me; I had to check for small holes and other faults (aka places were the paint could get through) and tape over them on the frame's "outside".. otherwise I would get small spots when printing on the fabric.. not cool. You have to be very careful when checking for holes, you don't want to miss any.. even if they are barely the size of a needle prick. So look many times to make sure there are no holes whatsoever.

Taping over all holes..

And that was all progress for today. My frame is now ready for a test printing!

Screen printing for Date's coat symbol pt.2

I said in the earlier screen printing post:

"And with that the art class had ended for me. More about this next week."

I LIED
Or well, not really, I just had forgotten that I have art class on Thursdays too... xD

Today I picked a frame to use. While I applied the photographic emulsion on the frame, in a semi-dark room (the stuff is light sensitive), the art teacher went to scan my symbol over from the A3 paper to two A4 halves on transparency paper. (no A3 available)

Photographic emulsion

Plan of attack: screen print frame and a metal scoop-ish thing with the emulsion in (it's actually more of a teal color IRL)

There was a certain technique how to apply the photographic emulsion. You would hold up the frame with one hand and hold the metal scoop with the liquid in the other. Put the scoop at the bottom of the frame and then carefully angle the scoop so that the photographic emulsion flows and touches the frame, when it does that angle the scoop sliiiiiightly back up (but have the emulsion still touching the frame) and run it up towards the frame. Just repeat until the frame's.. frame... is covered. After that do another run with the scoop but this time without angling it.. aka so that you don't get any more photographic emulsion on. Just run it down and up to wipe off the excess. I dunno if my explanations make sense...

When that was done I took some paper and wiped the corners of the frame clean (no need to have the liquid on those) and then used a very painted, if I might add blow-dryer to dry the frame super speed.

Before the drying operation

After that it was time to work with the symbol itself. As I said I now had two A4 sized halves which I had to match as perfectly as possible. My art teacher by the way printed out two of each half because just one alone looked so faded.. not dark enough.

If you look closely you can see that it's not perfectly matched..

I tried for a long time get the symbol to match perfectly but I noticed it was impossible to get all parts of the symbol to meet just right in the middle. If some part was perfect it was off somewhere else etc. But then, a lot of inner irritation later, I noticed that if I left a bit of space between the two halves all different parts of the symbol would match if I just drew a continuous fitting line over to the other half; it was as if the scanner had eaten a few millimeters of the symbol.

Next up was to use some clear tape to tape together the two halves to one. I didn't want them coming loose or having the layered halves (remember I had two of each half to get the symbol dark enough) move so that they are not perfectly on top of each other.

I put a lot of strips of tape along the middle on both sides

Okay, I had the symbol taped together into one piece.. but there was now a line of empty space in the middle which needed to be filled in with the missing "eaten" parts of the symbol. Marker to the rescue!

After using markers to fill in the missing parts..

That was all the progress for today. :)

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...