fieldtrip | DR2007 Surface Design

STPI Gallery
Date: 1 Nov 2018

STPI is short for Singapore Tyler Print Institute. They holds every artist & residence Programme for 4 weeks where they invite artists from different fields to create works in their basement workshop. The artists would create works with prints in their own styles and exhibit them in the gallery upstairs.

_{Aaron Curry playing a Gretsch Masterbuilt Penguin guitar at his studio in Hollywood, California.}

The artist on exhibition was Aaron Curry, a Los Angeles-based artist whose work explore the boundary between painting and sculpture. According to the tour guide, he spend his early life in Texas without books, arts or money. Mundane objects such as keys & bones thus have a huge influence on his subject. Later he went to LA for art study and his life changed with a museum visit where he shifted from a painter to a sculptor, inspired to explore in between 2d & 3d.

As we can see clearly, his works contained lots of pop neon-colors that was artificial. Shapes and patterns contained lots of body parts. There was energy in the vibrant colors and shape in his works. The process of his creation started with sketching on paper. Then he digitized them & made refinement and made a stencil based on it. He would cut sinfra PVC and dibond into shape and then coat them with paper pulp. After spraying paint, he added the silkscreen print to finish. All the pieces on show were selected from many same pieces made. Therefore each single piece is unique.

Besides the exhibition, we were also shown around the basement workshop but no photograph was allowed. There were all kinds of equipment & tools to use to product print arts such as hydraulic elephant press, paper mill and there was also an acid room.

 MagicTouch Printing
Date: 27 Sep 2018

During the field trip to TheMagicTouch store, the staff there Leon presented to us with a ppt. on basic knowledge on printing such as differences between RGB and CMYK. He also brought up the importance concept on the white. When we print on the transfer medium, the paper we use is default white and therefore whatever white design would be just left blank. There is no white printed on the transfer medium. When we transfer it to a non-white material, the white is no longer there. To solve this problem, they used printer with a special white toner that actually prints the white part.
Besides, he showed all kinds of transfer medium and some applications. With printing of etching circuit board and combination of a fabric transfer, they made a Santa with trees that actually lights up on the shirt. Another useful tip he mentioned was to print stitching lines or any other guideline with MagicTouch as it would make the making process especially alignment much easier.

He also demonstrated a new transfer medium called RST9.1, which can be transferred onto wood with just water and spray adhesive. This could be done using normal method with a heat press as well.
At the end, we asked him about some of the issues we had with transfer printing. Below is a list of things to take note:
• Adjust pressure of the heat press; it is important as the medium needs better contact with the materials and we need to adjust to fit objects with different thickness
• Preheat the fabric before transferring
• When peeling off after heat pressing, peel according to the fabric grain direction not across it