by D. Sproul | November 8th, 2009
Like many people, I grew up making crafts by hand. This artistic bent eventually led me to graphic design as a career. While artistic, graphics are removed from the actual get glue on your hands, make a mess, hand-crafting. I was thrilled with a recent discovery: “Printing by Hand,” a book by Lena Corwin. It’s a guide to printing on fabric, paper and furniture with handmade stamps, custom stencils, and silk screens. Since reading it I’ve been itching to try a few designs of my own. The creative possibilities are infinite.
She uses a wonderful reverse stencil on a dresser: she cut designs out of contact paper (often used to line shelves), stuck them to a white dresser, and painted a second color over the whole dresser with a roller. Then the designs were peeled off, revealing the base coat color. Simple, creative, and much quicker than painting a stencil with a stipple brush.
On another project, she cut a detailed leaf pattern out of freezer paper, which is a craft paper that is ironed onto fabric. She used spray paint as her medium! (Fast!) The print was on a chair; it needed to be durable, but not washable. The result looked great. The only drawback is that the stencil has one use.
Corwin created a wallpaper look on walls using a homemade mylar stencil. Her design happened to be a spooky looking tree, that was partly overlapped when painted. The mylar was cut out with an exacto knife (standard graphic design issue). The pattern was painted with a stipple brush in an almost random fashion over the walls. It looked as good as wallpaper, but I would imagine it would take a long time. I liked that it could be easily changed if you didn’t like it, simply by repainting. No weekend of wallpaper stripping! And I really like that you could stencil any design that appeals to you. (It’s one of my peeves that many craft projects and store-offered crafts look like the same person made them.)
The wall stencil reminds me of the painted wall designs I saw in Scotland at Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s house. He and his wife created a regular brown line grid pattern over an odd taupe wall base (brown-gray). The they painted silver and faint silvery green raindrops in a random pattern over the even grid. A true mesh of the Art Nouveau swooshes and curves and the Arts and Crafts movement.
Corwin also introduced silk-screening using two methods that didn’t involve “burning” a screen. At times a paper stencil blocked the ink from getting through the screen. It was just taped under the screen with masking tape. On another project she painted the design on the screen with drawing fluid, using a paper pattern under the screen as a guide. Then she filled the rest of the screen with screen filler, which filled in the screen everywhere except the pattern. Then the pattern made with drawing fluid was washed off with water, opening the screen holes just in the pattern area. The advantages of these are that they are reusable forever, as long as care is taken to clean the screen.
The creativity, designs and possibilties for imaginative wanderings appeal to me. So do the exactness of the cut patterns, and the vibrant colors. It’s a wonderful book, and I plan on making it a permanent addition to my library very soon.
Update 3/2010: I tried block printing with fabric ink onto white fabric. Very detailed stamps worked alright; I think a simpler design without small holes in it would work better.
