screen print

Research Into Creating For Wider Audiences

Accessibility Project, Internship at 3rd Rail

Dyslexia Friendly 

Key Points:

  • choose a more legible font- i.e. Arial, Comic Sans, Calibri, Open Sans (Sans Serifs preferable)
  • High contrast between text and background
  • larger font sizes and slightly bigger spaces between letters and words, and between lines of text (kearning/tracking/leading)
  • Off white neutral backgrounds with minimal patterns or pictures work best
  • Avoid uppercase/all caps/italics/underline, use bold if emphasis is needed
  • avoid green and red/pink as these are difficult for people with colour blindness
  • matt paper

Braille

Key Points:

  • tactile reading and writing system for visually impaired, blind, or deaf blind people
  • Braille symbols are formed with a matrix of up to six dots called a cell- a cell can be an individual letter, punctuation, number, or a whole word
  • uncontracted Braille- every letter is individually spelled out
  • contracted Braille- is like a form of shorthand Braille used for faster reading and to save paper
  • https://www.brailletranslator.org/

https://www.livingpaintings.org/
– These are books made for blind and visually impaired people, with the illustrations raised so that they can be touched and felt

https://thepurposelab.com/2014/09/5-tips-to-make-your-print-design-more-accessible/
– a helpful breakdown of the basics

Conductive ink
– could screenprint in conductive ink, creating an electrical circuit- this could be used to make my prints “speak” or something else?
https://www.bareconductive.com/news/make-sound-interactive-mural/
– https://www.wired.com/2013/10/conductive-ink-turns-paper-into-musical-instruments/

Things I could try/consider for future print based works

  • could try printing and applying different textures to my work- flocking, foiling, or using puff binder? This would mean my prints are more tactile
  • print on off white paper and be mindful of colours used
  • print in Braille?
  • choose fonts that are easier to read
  • making larger scale prints than I normally would, to aid legibility

This is just some research to lay the ground work for the project, but I think it’s a good start and there is already a lot to think about and potentially experiment with!

Pigment Samples Project

Internship at 3rd Rail, Weekly Summaries

Second week of my internship at 3rd Rail Print Space and I have been given a project to work on, which is super exciting!

I’ve been tasked with creating a set of pigment sample swatches on fabric to make into a book of swatches for clients, and also to scan and digitize these for the website.

What I’ve done so far:

  • Made a file of 10cm × 10cm squares, each with a 3cm border of blank space around them on Photoshop, which I then printed onto film
  • Coated and exposed a 48 silkscreen for fabric with the 6 square design
  • Mixed half of the pigments up with transparent fabric binder, ready to be printed with and made note of which ones I had and hadn’t mixed yet
  • Ratio of 6g of pigment to 100g of binder
  • Printed 6 of these colours onto the fabric (pinned and ironed out first)
  • Ran those 6 through the baker machine

I think one of them (fluoro orange) will need to be done again as it has a mark, but I am happy with the other five. I am concerned that the other fluoro colours aren’t as bright as I think they should be, but I followed the ratios correctly, and they match the booklet from the company, so I’ll check with my manager when I’m back in on Thursday. This is an ongoing project that I’ll be working on whenever it’s quiet during the 9-5 of my internship, until I have all 19 colours printed, scanned, edited and uploaded online as well as physically to do be made into a swatch book. This is a really good way for me to learn all the stages of the process, so I’m really pleased to have been given this to do!

“An Ode to My Vagina” work at Human Manifesto, CSM

Exhibitions, Photographs, UNIT 2, Work in Progress

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Process photos from screen-printing my illustration and poem piece “An Ode to My Vagina”. So far I only have the one finished print which I put into the Human Manifesto exhibition at CSM, ran jointly by the ArtsFem and LGBTQ societies at UAL, but I intend to print a limited run of this colour scheme, and others, to sell as prints. The illustration was drawn in pencil then gone over in pen, and scanned then cleaned up on Photoshop before I took it to the printmaking studios, and the poem (originally written on my phone) was also handwritten, scanned, and edited on Photoshop before printing.

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These photos show the piece being put up in the exhibition, and a few shots of the piece surrounded by other works in the show. Overall I am very happy with the presentation of my work, and of the response I got from attendees, so I would consider this a success, even though the text is slightly off centre on the illustration (something I will correct when I print more copies in print making).

This piece is deeply personal to me- as a non binary person I have always struggled with accepting my body, and in particular my vagina. For most of my life I hated it and wished it didn’t exist, and only saw it as existing for the pleasure of my sexual partners, not myself. Over the last few years I have been trying to accept, and eventually love, my body the way it is, which is very difficult when you have a lifetime of self hatred and self loathing built into your brain, and as part of this I started masturbating. Previously it was something I viewed as disgusting and dirty, something unnatural, but at the same time I felt broken for having no experience of it, so gradually discovering my body and coming to terms with my vagina’s existence, and my own independence (free of the burden of sexually gratifying others) has been a long journey. Many non binary people, trans men, and cis women have similar struggles with their bodies, but with this piece of work I speak purely for myself, and my own body.