Manga T-Shirt Designs Using Disperse Dyes | University Life

Today has been a very productive Thursday at university. In my screen printing module we had a full day learning about disperse dyes and how to use them. We were told to create an image that would then be screen printed onto a t-shirt using a heat press. Before the lesson I had bought two vest tops and blouse from Primark to test the dyes out on. The tops had to be a specific material of either polyester or nylon with a high synthetic fibre content in order for the prints to show up the best. I then drew what I wanted to be printed onto the clothing. I drew three Manga style faces of the same girl pulling different expressions; happy, angry and sad with the idea of using different colours to represent each emotion.

My first attempt that I did on the vest top didn't come out very well as the colours looked faded and the drawings looked smudged so the initial details of the drawing didn't show up clear enough. I was then advised by my tutor to have another go of reworking the original design and add more details to it with the additional lines to the hair which was then printed onto the blouse. This time the second attempt worked and the prints came out much clearer in detail and the colours were so vibrant! I was so happy with the result of this one! For the third one I tried creating a gradient with the dyes so that the character's faces and hair would be multicolour and I LOVE the effect it created! Annoyingly I didn't take a proper photograph of it on my camera so I only have the images taken on my phone, damn it! But I am thrilled with the results of this disperse dye attempt!

I'm really enjoying this module, and this lesson especially on discovering how the disperse dyes work and seeing the effects of the designs printed onto clothing. I find the whole process so interesting to learn. It's definitely one of the modules I've had the most fun with!

Thanks for reading! <3
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