Monday, January 19, 2009

T-shirt Transfer experiment

metaphyiscal portrait of kitten-head t-shirt transfer
image info: Sushi my cat, and I showing off our Hand tie- dyed t-shirt with an image transfer of my cat head drawing on it:
pandimensional kitten-head
I have wanted to print some of my drawings onto shirts/bags and whatnots for awhile now. I tampered with the art of silk screening by doing it very home-remedy style in my tiny little studio space but my results were not predictable and I found that the more detailed my drawing was the worse it printed. Some have told me this was due to the gage of mesh I was using, some told me that it was because I needed to actually use proper equipment to get nice crisp results and frankly I don’t have any money for MORE equipment/supplies. So I tried buying some cheapo t-shirt transfers that you can just print on using an ink jet. It really didn’t work well at all. It left this ugly white film behind and started cracking and falling off within a few hours( as seen in photo). The first time I washed it the image disintegrated. I have been told that I need to buy commercial grade transfer paper if I want to get it right and have the image be durable and long lasting. It doesn’t seem so terribly expensive either….so soon enough I may have a bunch of new merchandise to sell!…maybe shirts/patches,/bags with prints….don’t know!

2 comments:

  1. Oooh.. very cool! I've wanted to do the same on some of my own tank tops and t-shirts.

    ReplyDelete
  2. go for it! i asked some questions about this on etsy because i had seen a few shops with a lot of their art prints on shirts/bags/hats. they are using Commercial grade transfer paper. they had linked me to this product as an example: http://www.coastalbusiness.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=60441
    you can read the etsy post for more info if your curious: http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5967723

    ReplyDelete