May 13, 2011

Under construction: Barriss' cloak

During the last four evenings, the only sound that was heard was: thump thump thump thump thump thump thump and some unmentioned Finnish words which happened to escape our lips during the process. Indeed, it was time for printing Barriss' cloak fabric.

As I said, this project took four evenings, Hiron helped me out during the first two. We made one template out of soft plastic that was found from our local fabric store. The downside of this material was that it started to curl as the pattern had a lot of small strands in it. I got really frustrated with it while doing the final two lines, consisting 16 individual prints. But clearly I weren't as frustrated as Hiron during the first evening when it looked like the pattern was wrong, parts being too far apart from each other and the color was too light.

After going through most of her emotion arsenal, (the time I decided it was best to retreat) Hiron made a simple solution for the problem. She linked the small figures together with a brush, used more blue color in the mixture and finally pressed the wet print with a paper, removing the excess paint and making it more animate.

The template of doom!

There was another small problem with the template. After doing three lines, we noticed that the pattern started to look smaller and it was clearly missing parts. The paint had stuck on the template, closing the holes and making a nice layer on the plastic's surface which acted like a sticker tape. For this, there was a easier solution: a wash.

So after sitting, kneeling and lying on the floor for hours the print was finally finished, now only thing left to do is to create the network-like structure and put the cloak together.

Casualties: one telephone directory, yoki's right index finger and few stiff back muscles.

-yoki out