The Netherlands Experience

Amsterdam in pictures. Well, mainly street art.

It was awesome.

Uni the Anthology 2---making of

Uni printing. Now this was interesting. It all started because we couldn't get answers from the print houses. It was a bummer. So we decided to do the job ourselves.
We have awesome printing equipment at school and very knowing people so it was in the end quite easy. We printed over 100 copies of the journal. Not everything went well, we made a couple on mistakes and had to fight with the stapler only so many times, but at least now we are ready.

Complete with twelve young talents work, this year was "nightmare" themed. They had complete freedom in creating their illustrations or one-shot comics and we had gotten a lot of awesome looking work. Most of the participants are from Finland, but we did have a canadian artist in this project too. I am very excited that this project did come out in time and is looking good. Hope that next part will be as awesome as this one was!

UNI2 the nightmares

We did learn that nothing should be ever left till the last minute.

Helsinki's comic festival 2013

Comic festival was a blast. it was my second comic festival selling at small print tent. I was sitting next to my friends Laura Heikkala http://heikala.deviantart.com/ and Petrushttp://kitchen-bitch.deviantart.com/
The weather was nice and warm, although it was really windy. But that is pretty normal in Helsinki.

 

I saw a lot of friends of mine whom I haven't seen in a while. Speaking of which, Wolf http://susiajasoraa.sarjakuvablogit.com/ was being interviewed on Sunday regarding his graphic novel "Miska pähkinä" about a transgender guy and his social experiment in Britain. It's a great novel and I recommend it to anyone and everyone.

Our UNI²  was on sale there too, as well as my mini comic "stupid comic 0" which is a compilation of one-page comics about stupid stuff and daily life.
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Material manipulation I

We had an awesome course of fabric manipulation at school, where we could test out some various printing techniques. Usually you see these techniques used in t-shirt prints, especially in the nineties.

We tested glitter print, flock/fuzz print and vinyl-like foil print. The flock print was hardest of these three, since you had to be very careful with the temperature and the use of glue. If the temperature of hot iron is not hot enough it will rip the transfer fuzz/flock or the glue might not stick to the flock. But after a while of practice it gets easier to understand what temperatures to use and how to attach the flock.

The foil print was the easiest one of the three. It works a bit like the flock print, but you don't have to be as careful with the temperatures as with the flock. The print surface comes out smooth and shiny.
The glitter print was on the other hand a bit of a mess, since it's just plain glitter that you spinkle on top of you pattern made of glue.

The only problem with these patterns are the fact that they are not durable. Patterns are almost gone after a couple of washes, which is a shame really. I guess there are some room for improvements to make regarding the textile glue, so that it could make a durable and washable, cool looking fabric.

We were asked to print a pattern of our choise on a fabric of our choise using one of these techniques.
I chose the classical japanese pattern called "seikaiha". It was originally a Chinese pattern that was designed to illustrate oceans and seas on maps.
It's not an easy pattern to print. Targeting was hell. I don't have a picture of the finished fabric, but a couple of pictures from the process.