Blog — Design Process RSS

A friend of mine recently asked me how I screenprint yardage, so I set up my camera on a tripod in my studio to document my first time printing  'Pasto'. The technique I use for screenprinting yardage is not only the old-school method, it's the ultra-low-tech, do-it-in-your-basement variety.  My grandmother's screenprinting workshop used the same method, but her equipment was much bigger and better.  Behold: Most of the screenprinted fabric you see in modern clothing is printed using a completely different method, in which silkscreens are cylinders and the printing table is a conveyer belt.  I have had fabric printed this way in a large factory in Lima.  While the process lacks the charm of manual yardage screenprinting, it's easier to print wider fabrics and...

It might be blasphemy to alter one of my grandmother's famous prints, Llama-Llama, but horizontal lines are hard to wear and a headache to cut for garments.  I do love my grandmothers original, especially the way each hand-drawn llama is ever-so-slightly different if you look closely enough.  I'll bring back the original in the future, but at the moment I'm planning to print shirts and dresses with this design and I want my llamas distributed randomly like a happy herd in the Andes of Peru.  With the help of Illustrator and a random number generator I created a design, then altered the edges of my design so that it would repeat seamlessly.  I took the image to a local silkscreen...