Friday, June 6, 2008

Printing photos on fabric

I conducted a workshop on this at Bestway twice today, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. There were 9 people in each group. I brought in my 2 laptops and 2 printers and Pam helped with another laptop and printer.

The first part of the workshop was a talk on the process and a display of the media that you can use - transfer papers, commercial ready prepared printable sheets and DIY sheets. Then I demonstrated how to prepare your own using Bubble Jet Set and freezer paper. It is less expensive, but definitely more time consuming.

After a break for a cuppa, we printed an image on fabric for each person, using the commercial ready prepared sheets. Most people had emailed an image beforehand, and I had edited them in Photoshop, basically cropping and enhancing brightness/contrast, before enlarging to A4 size. They were offered the option of printing their original image or the edited one. If they hadn't sent an image I had prepared some extras for them to select from.

Everyone seemed very pleased with their printed images (no-one chose to print their original, which was rather flattering!). There was a little time at the end when Pam and I demonstrated some of the effects you can obtain with filters. I think this could be another workshop.

Here is an image with inverted colours.


Then the same image has had the liquefy filter applied. Rather spooky - can you see the little imp?


I have learned quite a bit from this workshop too. When I did a similar one for Designing Women all the images sent (by chance) were reasonably high resolution so they could be enlarged without falling to pieces. One of today's images was originally only 2.5 by 3 cm with a ppi of 150 so it was very fuzzy (pixelated) when enlarged. She liked it, but I now know that people need to be warned to make sure the images are high resolution.

I am very tired. I know I used to teach all day as a matter of course, but I am 7 years away from that. I still like teaching - but I doubt I could cope with adolescents again. Preschoolers (in small amounts like the bread making episode for Helen's class last week) perhaps, adults definitely. Thanks, ladies.

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