Here are my notes from the Digital Painting and Printing for Fabric session from USITT 2012. Yes, despite the very tactile nature of the textile side of things, the digital revolution is changing things in costumes just like everywhere else. And while the startup costs are a lot higher than an LED, this is a trend that is definitely going to continue. (LED’s weren’t cheap to begin with either.) The era of designing a costume in photoshop and sending it to a “printer,” and having it come out fully formed is upon us. Here’s what these talented and knowledgable ladies had to say about it all! (All mistakes and misinformation is MINE, probably resulting from my horrible typing. If you have a correction for me—please let me know and I’ll gladly make it. The web is good for that type of thing!)

From right to left in the picture the panelists were: Anne Porterfield
 - North Carolina State University College of Textiles; Holly Poe Durbin
- University of California at Irvine/ Freelance Costume Designer; Jan Chambers
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill/ PlayMakers Repertory Company; Naomi Yoshida
- Creative Manager for Disneyland Entertainment Costumes; Jennifer Andicochea
-Disney Entertainment Costumes and Sublimation Department.

Ann started the session out talking about technology.

Digital textile printing came out of large format banners, carpet printing, sample preparation. Most fabric still printed on roller screen.

Too expensive for sampling, so digital printing came in, and taken off in last 10 years.

Recent developments include:

Faster print speed, individual print bureaus (companies)

Bigger print heads for more colors, fabric feed is improving, interchangeable inks so reactive or acid inks, pigment printing.

Engineered prints – new field. Printing directly onto fabric with markers, so you can stitch a piece of clothing with a seamless effect.

Allover Repeats – now dedicated software for that.

Pigment vs. dyes.

Pigment adheres but doesn’t react to substrate, so it sits on surface. A little more subject to cracking or can rub off. But less color shift – what you see is what you get. Can only print on hydrophilic surfaces, but color gamut is getting bigger, and its cheaper than dye-based inks. Prep easier, less water used.

Dye Based Inks

Dyes will let you print on anything that can be dyed.

Wider color gamut, wider variety of substrates.

Pretreatment of fabric required, and you will get color shift. Wet fastness is better.

Software you can use for developing textiles includes Pointcarre, Lectra, Photoshop, Illustrator.

Color reduction capabilities is very important. You will need to take photo/design into software, and reduce the colors in it into as many colors as you want, or as many colors as the printer can handle. Important in pigment printing, b/c color gamut is limited, so you want to reduce the colors—if you don’t, the printer will, and it won’t make good choices. Your piece will look a mess. Software offers many repeat options, too.

Lectra –

Co. from France with suite of software for fabric – woven, knit, vector-based for design, and patternmaking.

Lectra Kaledo Print – color reduction, but also with gradients. So you can take a much more complex motif hand-painted, and reduce to a number of gradients to keep hand painted effect.

Motif management – can keep ind. Motifs in clipboard, and put them in repeat in different layers, bigger, smaller, maniupluate them in those layers.

Colorways option – this will toss all your colors and put them in different combinations, putting same colors in different places.

Other options for “printing” clothing include: Seamless knitting, jacquard knitting and weaving, and 3d printing.

Seamless knitting – a big knitting machine which will knit a piece of clothing ready to wear.

Jacquard knitting similar to weaving – does a 4-color or 3-color knit, create a knit design, and have the machine knit it. Can do knit simulations in Lectra Kaledo Knit software, so you can see how much of pattern it will recognize.

Some of the pics in the slideshow of student examples are really beautiful.

EAT software for woven designs.

After the technology portion, Jan Chambers from UNC Chapel Hill gave a presentation on the process of using “On Demand Digital Printing” bureaus—basically places that will print out your fabric for you. You create design in a digital file, send it to company, and they print it out for you. Very simple compared to in-house printer, but have to be careful.

Some On Demand Digital Printing bureaus are:

Spoonflower

First2Print

KarmaKraft

Fabric on Demand

TC Squared – not for profit doing research into digital printing

Selecting a printing company

The companies are very user friendly. Try to get to know them as well as you can so you can call them up with questions.

Things to keep in mind:

-Turnaround Time – companies in U.S. quicker than one located in China. (Obviously)

-Setup or editing charges? This is important if you have idea, but have no idea how to make it happen. Some companies will do your design or coach you through it. The Spoonflower website can coach you thru it, good website.

-What are fabric selections? Check for fiber content, finish, width.

-What is the dye process? Acid/reactive, pigment (nanopgiment – TC squared entering here, a very fine spray) Pigment doesn’t go “thru” the fabric to other side. But look is different than acid reactive dye. Acid/reactive does more saturated colors many think, pigment doesn’t do large areas very well. But nanopgiments better at that. It’s all in flux.

-Color samples - Some companies want you to do all color adjustments on front end, some want a paper print out that you’re happy with, some send back printed swatch to confirm colors. This is a safe way to go, you don’t want surprises.

-Color adjustments

-Cost/minimum yardage – most by the yard, but some do by square yard. Silks more expensive than cottons, obviously.

-Ecology, Made in USA, Local – these are important to some people. Think about it.

Spoonflower

-Great website info.

-6-7 day turnaround.

-Natural fiber fabrics, swatchbook available for $1

-Pigment dyes – this is all they offer.

-Color chart available – good info on website for adjustment

-send you an 8”x8” swatch – discount for multiple swatches.

-No minimum yardage, $18-$38, depending on fabric. Silk widths narrower, mostly.

-Designer discount 10% if you print a pattern you’ve designed. You can also buy other people’s fabrics. Or 20+ yards is 10% (Owls look like a big fave there in terms of people’s designs they’ve put up – put a bird on it! Go Etsy!)

KarmaKraft

-We think they’re in China, but can’t get any confirmation on that.

-Great website as well.

- 2-4 week turnaround.

-Happy to be contacted to help you best create the design your looking for.

-Very, very wide range of fabrics. Natural fibers primarily, but do have a poly-satin, or they will print on fabric you provide. Or they’ll source a fabric for you.

-Reactive and dispersive dyes – laundered post-printing, ready to work with

-$20-$34 per yard, 1 yard minimum

TC2

-Inkdrop Printing

-2 week turnaround

-natural fibers, but b/c research institute, they also have unusual items/fabrics . Swatch available.

-Very up for unusual projects. (All of these companies are up for small yardage projects. )

-Acid, reactive and nanocolor pigment dyes.

-Requests paper print-out for color adjustment.

-No miniumum yardage $55-$65/yard. They’re pricier, but not a big company, they give you a lot of attention and willing to help if you have unusual things.

-imagetwinsolutions – body scanning.

Examples! Engineered prints for fans. One by Rachel Pollock up top. (http://labricoleuse.livejournal.com/)

They use original artwork, sampled and manipulated image printed on voile fabric so there’s a transparency there.

Eric Abele designed a “tooth print” fabric for Larry the Tooth Fairy print for Goodnight Moon at Lexington Children’s Theater. Now available on SpoonFlower! He used the repeat process to get his tooth image to repeat. Really cute pics.

A grad student was trying to recreate a 1910 Edwardian dress, but couldn’t find fabric anywhere. So after research she printed fabric. Shanna Parks was the student. Any project that requires something very specific, digital printing might be the way to go.

Another example of digital printing would be for engineering fabric aging. Rachel Pollock needed a specific prison uniform for The Parchman Hour. Went with Spoonflower to create a pre-aged cotton fabric. After getting fabric she soda-ash washed and dyed it, and did more treatment to it. This was for PlayMakers Rep.

Jan walked us through the process of creating seamless kimonos – there’s no way to recreate this in the notes. But essentially it let them lay out patterns pieces with seam and overlap allowance so that once the fabric was printed and arranged, the image on the actor would be continuous. The kimonos at the end looked amazing.

Holly Poe Durbin gave her part of the seminar: Incorporating Textile Design into Costume Design Curriculum

Holly wanted to offer this fabric printing technology to her students, so thanks to a grant she spent a year or so researching her options, and then purchasing equipment for her design students.

To learn things like textile designs, you do have to get immediate feedback on designs to check that scale is correct. She ended up with a sample making machine for fashion industry.

She uses Photoshop or Illustrator to teach students to design in, b/c a lot of students know them or can be taught quickly. They start with a fancy-dress collar from 1930s in Elizabeth collar. It looks like lace from a stage distance, which was her criteria.

There’s a privately published textbook called Adobe Photoshop for Textile Design by Frederick L Chipkin – www.origininc.com – will take you step by step through how to do this. VERY step by step. You will learn Photoshop by end of book. She does add a bit of intro on Photoshop vocab and costume vocab.

DigiFab Evolution software also is used in class. They are a RIP software – Raster Image Processer. It has a design side, and a software side that speaks to printer. Take photoshop image, put into software, and it will turn it into fabric.

She chose a Mimaki JV4-130 printer– it’s being discontinued. But a new version is coming out. A multipurpose large-format inkjet plotter that prints directly on fabric. “Printer comedy on steroids”

The fabric is backed on paper, unlike sublimation process. Uses dual dye-ink set. An acid ink or reactive.

Acid – silk, nylon, wool

Reactive – cotton, rayon, linen and silk

NO polyester. Can only use that with sublimation. Can convert machine into sublimation dye, but that’s in the future for her.

Printing has to be heat-set, just like doing dying by hand. She uses a vertical steamer.

Textile Design Steps

Using a sample from Melody Brocious.

Design Idea –

Create Motif –

Format Color Profile – very important. Printeres cannot see as many colors as screen or human eye. Have to flatten color image. Otherwise you confuse printer.

Turn into Print Repeat - Do lines match for continuous fabric? Or are they off? Need to take care of that before info gets to printer.

Create Layout for Printer (RIP software)

Print Tests for Scale and Color (uses extra yards, plan for that…)

You can shrink designs down to do mini-tests on smaller areas of fabric, so you don’t use full-size and waste fabric.

Print Final Design

Heat Set - Can be laborious, pulling off paper of 10 yeards, rolling and putting in steamer.

Completed Fabric - (IF ONLY IF dye set properly) IF dye fastness is an issue, print one yard, then test that by washing.)

Two kinds of textile design

-Engineered Fabric

-Print to Piece, print right on patterns.

One of biggest challenges is calibrating color profile from screen to fabric. The textbook mentioned above explains how to do color profiling. So you can print out color profiles on your fabric, and choose hue, color and saturation on your fabric, then set that in Photoshop.

Printers again do NOT see as many colors, so need to identify which formulas of color you can use. Not to mention how these colors will look like when under stage lights.

Vector.tutsplus.com – tutorial for all things vector and printing.

Online courses from Frederick Chipkin – author of textbook above. Try them before starting journey. Craftart.edu.

DigiFab systems in L.A. is a supplier: software, printer, ink, pre-coated fabrics. If you get ink and fabrics from different suppliers they will not always be as light fast as you hoped.

Jacquard – just branched out into digital fabric. www.jacquardproducts.com

Specialty Graphic Imaging Association – Tradeshosw featuring printer manufactures.

FLAAR – non-profite research institute wide-format-printers.net

Working with museums, so they understand the under-funded insittuation, and can read knowledgable review of what you might be interested in.

Disneyland Creative Costuming Sublimation

Disney predominantly uses sublimation, with a DigiFab printer.

The printer has been a good investment for them—they are able to quickly create fabrics and materials for every area of the Disney empire quickly and much cheaper than outsourcing it.

Sublimation: - digital printing onto fabrics, inks are converted into gas and chemically bonded with fabric. The process uses ink, heat and pressure.

Doesn’t just print on top of fabric. It prints on paper, then you take the paper and sandwich it with polyster fabric, run it thru a heat press, and the polyester pores open up and the ink is released from paper and onto fabric. Comes out dry and ready to use.

The printer works best in dry environment—humidity will blur. But you can get printers with heaters in them.

Disney has an on-site sublimation and graphics development team, on separate space – no longer sharing space with 400 degree heat press.

They have 650 unique designs on file and printed 10,000 yards in FY11.

Sublimating substrates works on soft and rigid fabrics – so some samples include knits, woven, sequins, chiffon, and more.

They use sublimation process to create their own patterns – for example, the fabric for Goofy pants purchased many years ago is no longer available. So they painted fabric on printer. Gave color choices to costumer, tried to match swatch – match pantone colors.

The Disney crew has expanded their work throughout the years as word has gotten around the company exactly what they can do. They have their own catalogue that they send throughout the company.

One unique thing they use as a substrate is a mug. They just gave out mugs to people on the panel. Too sweet! They can also print on memory foam type products like mousepads, luggage tags, buttons, candy canes,

And now for the door prizes! They asked who had a tape measure? 10 hands immediately go up. Other questions for prizes included asking who had a safety pin? Maybe 5 hands this time. :-) Fab Five of Disneyland Superstars? (Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy, Pluto) Plus 2? Chip n Dale. Furthest person in room came from Australia, and they win the last one!

Someone asked if Disneyland still used polyester only as fabric, and they do, b/c that works in their environment.

Sublimation Process

Printer does 20 yards/hr. Heat press transfer to fabric. 4 yards/hr. Rolls immediately at end of machine.

Sublimation used on Disney on Ice, Princess Tiana Showboat Jubilee, Pixar Play Parade for umbrellas, World of Color barricade covers.

Engineered prints – which help create universal sizes for costumes. This universal sizing also means they can create super-mini sizing for testing, like doll-sized clothes. (Check out the pic for an example of this—that's a pic of Monster Girl dress from the Pixar Play Parade. The top pic is a 1-foot-high sample they made, then from the same pattern and file they made the life-sized version. All they had to do was scale up the design in the software once they knew it would work.)

Benefits of Sublimation

-Reduces time on sourcing fabrics – no more time wasted on trying to source fabrics. Not dependent on market. Don’t need 100 yards minimum

-Dramatically extends life of fabrics – UV resistant, so long life outdoors. Lasts twice as long, so essentially half the cost.

-Consistent fabric and print quality – they own files, quality stays high

-No minimum order

-Environmental: transfer paper is recycled, Reduces storage footprint.

-Quick Turnaround

And that’s it!