Here's the deal - no carrier, mas organic

T-shirt printing is typically the physical process of pressing an ink gelatin through a polyester mesh onto a shirt and creating a physical bond between the typically plastic ink and the fibers on the t-shirt. Because the inks themselves are pigments, they are resting on top of the fiber versus a dye which would be embedded with the fiber. A discharge ink is considered a dye because it removes the dye that is giving a shirt a color. In order to put a color on a t-shirt you need to embed a pigment. The pigment themselves are natural in that all color comes from organic materials, but the carriers, the solutions that the inks are printed with art typically plastisol or acrylic. Water based inks are acrylics, generally, with the exception of discharge inks, and therefore they harden around the fiber and the only difference between acrylics and plastisol is that plastisol hardens with heat and hardens quicker. My work is based on literally embedding particles, smaller and smaller, into the fibers so that the physical bond of the color is with the fiber itself and not with the plastic mediums that hold the color in them.

Why, oh why do I find these things to try and turn the world of printing upside down? I don't know what, but I am not happy with the idea that water-based inks are considered more natural than plastisol, when they are just as much as plastic themselves. Printing directly with pigments that create a physical bond inside the fiber of the garment is a direct process that can eliminate the chemicals that are typically considered "bad" for screenprinting. I don't have a name for this stuff yet, but the concept to me is simliar to sand painting and therefore the t-shirts with this type of design should not be considered as permanent. Just like you don't expect your vegetables to last forever, you should not expect your t-shirt designs to last forever.

The harsh reality comes down to the question of will this cost more? T heoretically less materials should result in less expenses and translate into less cost for the consumer. The problem, and this is how we getcha' is that there is more immediate handling of the inks and shirts, so it may be a product that cost more, as far as, time on the press, handling and dry time. Personally, I don't care about the cost from an individual printing my own work standpoint, but from the consumer's standpoint this could be an issue. I like the concept though because it takes me back to my original expertise, which is from photography, and the idea that the pigments make the design is also similar to how the silver pigments in film and photo-sensitized paper is what makes the image appear in photographs. I am now conceiving a print of very fine particles of graphite on a t-shirt, without a gelatin emulsion carrier, being embedded into a white t-shirt with a physical bond between the fibers and the graphite making the print stay. This is a truly archival print and until the cotton or the graphite are disturbed, nothing should break them down besides atmospheric conditions and atomic decay.