JUUSTOKAKKU

As we promised this post is about our silkscreen making and printing process.
At the cosplay backstage a lot of other cosplayers asked us about our prints and how we made them. Well, this post is mostly about our process on how and what we did this time, but we will probably do a proper silkscreen printing tutorial in a near future.

The basic thing in silkscreen prints are that everything you do in black while making the plastic sheet will eventually come out in color when you print it into the fabric. You don't need to cut anything so this is totally different technique than template printing.

Mitsuhides cloak prints

We both analyzed the source pictures thoroughly and based on those pictures we drew sketches on paper. The size needed to be exactly right, especially in Chacha's case, where all the prints needed to click to their correct places. Same thing needed to be done to Mitsuhide's ...under cloak parts (I don't know how to describe them !!). The print on those parts was a four-way continuous pattern and fairly difficult to adjust on their right places.

Dalin working on light table

Dalin had a light table so drawing the pictures to plastic sheet was fairly easy, because when making these kinds of pictures you need to be careful that the light doesn't come through from wrong places. This will be a hindrance later on.

Silkscreens on a windowsill

In total we used 9 different silkscreens to get all the prints. That's a lot and it took a lot of time to make all of those. It was awesome thing that we got a permission to use spaces and class rooms in Dalin's school to work with this project. The printing room and pattern making room were mostly the main base for our work.

The pink stuff in screens is exposure emulsion which is really important material in silkscreen printing. Without that stuff you can't do complicated prints. You need UV-light to harden the emulsion so we used the UV-light exposure machine and sunlight. Yeah, it is possible to harden the emulsion only by keeping it in sunlight for a few minutes.

Washing the exposure emulsion off from the screen is the annoying part. Glad there was a pressure washer in Dalins school.

Part of Chacha's haori

Mitsuhide's cloak is getting some prints !! At 11 pm.

Deeeeep concentration going on.

Printing the fabric was the fun part !! Some awesome music playing in the background and just printing print after print is somehow fun to do. Until you screw something up.... Some mild screw ups happened, but we were able to cover them !!

- D