I have spend a lot of time working with cold casting materials and epoxies to create durable artwork, mostly detailed here at photofresco.blogspot.com. Now I am going to turn my attention towards cotton and printing and try to have the same amount of fascination that I have had with embedded pigments and apply it to screen printing. I love testing things and seeing if they work, so I hope this makes for some interesting projects.
My last experiments with t-shirt printing was to make a label free t-shirt by printing the size information into the shirt with an ink that would wash out. I found that mixing particles in a water-based paste would still leave pigments embedded in the fabric, which I think is the basis of pigment dyed garments anyway. The smaller the pigments the more they should embed themselves and the more difficult it would be to remove the color, even if there isn't any binder holding the pigment in the t-shirt once it is washed. Which means that it could be possible to print with inks that have no binder and still get designs that stay on a t-shirt, for awhile. Eventually it seems like the pigments would loosen and wash out. This would cause a t-shirt print to lighten over time. This very well could be a more organic way to print t-shirts even though it would essentially be an image that could dissolve away.
My base ink was made with a ethyl cellulose and I tested mixtures of gum arabic and some thickener. I was surprised by how well the ink printed and how well it stored in a plastic container with a lid. I am going to get out my concoction, now that it is a month later, and see if it still works.
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