Sunday, September 30, 2018

B'reishith: Creation of a Multiprocess T-Shirt

The other day, I got an idea for a T-shirt for Simchat Torah, the holiday that celebrates our rejoicing over finishing the annual public reading of the Torah and the beginning of the next year's cycle. I wanted to start with a black or navy T-shirt and a bleach resist process to create a bit of a glow around the image of a Torah, with the word "B'reishith" ("In the beginning") in the center, and a flared star behind the last letter (Taf). The idea was to echo the concept of separating the light from the darkness, the First Day.

As the design formed in my mind, it echoed the words of two religions:
In the beginning, [The Name] created the heaven and the earth. [Gen. I:1]
In the beginning, there was the Word, and the Word was G-d... [Luke I:1]
Having had some questions about bleeding with a paper resist, and wanting an effect that would be produced by bleaching onto a damp shirt, I chose to use a reverse stencil to set up a wax resist for batik. My original plan for the stencil was to cut a piece of plastic poster board, which I've found to be an excellent and inexpensive stencil base. (Note: it does need to be cut down to fit through a Cricut or other home cutter.) My first cut, set at "stencil vinyl", didn't penetrate the plastic. My second, set for "Stencil Vinyl" (pressure 171), didn't penetrate completely. I tried cutting again set at "Stencil Film - 0.4 mm" (pressure 341), but forgot to reposition my cut, so I ended up ruining the stencil material for this particular use and had to use Cricut Stencil Vinyl instead.

[Aside: I was completely underwhelmed by Cricut Stencil Vinyl. It had an adhesive back, which meant the stencil stuck to itself as I tried to remove it from the backer film, and it was so thin that my stencil tore in several places. It didn't easily lend to using both the original and the reverse stencil, and it doesn't lend easily to stencil reuse.]

After much materials wrangling, I finally positioned my stencil in place and waxed my resist area. Removing the stencil was another chore, as my wax was harder than the stencil material and I would still need the stencil for the final splatter paint.

I dampened the shirt and started spritzing bleach. I probably should have bleached first and watered later, since the glow area wasn't as bleached as I would have liked, and extended much further than I would have liked.

After bleaching and wax removal
After washing to remove the remainder of the beeswax, I applied various splotches of fabric dye and water bleeds to bring the bleached area back to about where I wanted it. Overdyeing didn't help as much as I would have liked, but it did add a lovely layer of complexity to the shirt.

After overdyeing
Next, my lettering. After a bit of hemming and hawing, I chose silver foil (to mimic the "dressings" we have on many real-life torahs) for the letters and a silvery holographic vinyl for the "star". Choosing Shlomo STAM for my typeface was a no-brainer, since I wanted to echo the formality and divinity of the Sefer Torah. Unfortunately the holographic vinyl didn't show up as well as I wanted, and neither vinyl wanted to adhere well at the fussy, tiny points.

I finished up the shirt by reapplying the stencil to the entire torah area and splattering the shirt with silver Liquitex acrylic ink and silver Ph. Martin pen ink to create th effect of stars in the firmament surrounding the Book of Creation, separating the Earth from the Heavens...

Completed T-shirt

"B'reishith" is a one-off, an "artist t-shirt". But I'd like to take another go at trying to simplify the process of something a bit closer to my original vision.


Wednesday, September 5, 2018

Prototyping in Paper

As you might notice from my most recent posts, I'm on a bit of a roll working on Jewish designs for Cricut and other electronic cutters. I tend to focus more on Jewish themes around the major holidays, as well as in response to an overabundance of nominally-Christian-themed arts and crafts.

Before I commit T-shirts to the designs I'm creating in my Design Space portfolio, I need to test size and proportions to see if the concepts in my mind will work.

Because it's relatively cheap, cardstock is my go-to prototyping medium. Cutting paper gives me a good idea of how long a design would take to produce, whether my design is too complex for the medium, whether the size I have in mind is appropriate, and whether or not it will scale up and down.

My first prototype of "David Ben Avraham/Bar Mitzvah" went a bit awry. I like to prototype lettering layers by setting them to "write" loading a fine point Cricut marker into the "A" tool side rather than cutting and having to worry about all sorts of little cut-out letter shapes floating around. I used 12" x 12" paper and the oldest of my light grip mats. Unfortunately, the "grip" has worn off and the mat didn't load correctly. I cancelled the cut halfway into the write. Then, for whatever reason, I reloaded the project on the same mat (and reusing the same paper), but with the letters set to cut out instead of print. Pieces of cut-out letters went skittering around the mat, getting stuck on the point of the knife, and doing all sorts of nasty stuff. That said, I learned some really important lessons.
  1. My original design concept has too much information on it to be legible at ten feet, regardless of whether I print it at 10" (normal women's T-shirt design width) or 12" (full width of the cutting path and of heat transfer vinyl).
  2. Even with basic cleaning up, the hand-sketched design had enough irregularities that it took the Cricut an extremely long time to run through what should have been very basic cuts.
  3. A distinct "edge" around the sides of all the pieces and edges in the project would have been very difficult to weed and to register properly.
So I spent several hours tracing over my design with Illustrator's "arc" tool and "direct selection" tool, translating my pencil and marker strokes into vector paths and Bézier curves, and eventually into shapes that would take color (so I know they are complete paths, and so I can separate them and organize them by color and layer in Design Space). Unfortunately, two of my complete paths refused to take a color fill. Sigh. Once that was done, I imported the .svg file into Design Space.

After organizing my layers, I ran a test cut in paper:


While the separated disks and sides of the scroll ends are nice in theory, I forgot to duplicate, slice, and dice the top handles, so there are two paper pieces where there should only have been one.

I fixed up the handles and set the three scroll surfaces to two different shades of brown.



A second, flatter version, welds those pieces into a single piece suitable for iron-on, though in a more cartoonish fashion. I would have loved to have been able to weld the open text and scrolls into a single piece for that version, but every time I tried, the refuses-to-fill center portion caused the entire shape to disappear. I left the text out of this one; it's just the template.


Another method I tried is a bit more stylized, using thick lines instead of different colors of heat-transfer vinyl. This style would be nicely visible, but leaves very little room for lettering.


I'm currently working on a T-shirt design for a sandek, the equivalent of an infant boy's godfather. I'll gather a few basic designs into a portfolio to prove I can create them, and customize from there as needed.

Saturday, September 1, 2018

More on Non-Western Alphabets, Bar Mitzvah T-Shirts

After talking with an Observant Jewish friend, I got the idea for a design I felt might be a bit more appropriate for a Bar Mitzvah t-shirt.

Design Sketch

Jewish men tend to have strong memories of the parshah (weekly Torah and Haftorah (Prophets) readings) they were required to learn for the public synagogue performance that defines most modern B'nai Mitzvah (Bar Mitzvahs). The readings are tied to specific weeks of the Jewish calendar. I came up with the graphic idea of a Torah scroll, open for reading, with the Bar (or Bat) Mitzvah's Jewish name, along with the parshah and date (intended to be written in Hebrew). I used "David ben Avraham" as a generic male name, and since my Hebrew and Jewish learning isn't that great and I wasn't at home when sketching, I chose the parshah "Vayyera" as one whose name I remembered, sketching it in English to be customized in Hebrew for any particular Bar Mitzvah.


Once I got home, I used a couple of brush markers to ink the outlines of the scroll, imported it into my graphics programs, and uploaded it into Design Space.


Note that the lines have been thickened, and the rollers colored in a single (flat) brown to make them easier to cut and weed. (I have since added a white underlayer for the parchment.)

Following the method I outlined in my previous post, I added my sample Bar Mitzvah boy's name and the words "Bar Mitzvah" in Photoshop and curved the text appropriately:



Vertical Text Typing Reversal

The problem came when I started trying to insert the vertical text in Photoshop: because I forgot to check the "switch orientation" icon, the letters were jumbled together, and when I started separating them by putting each on a separate line, they disappeared... and then they appeared, in reverse order. Even when I copied my text into vertical orientation, they were in reverse order... until I typed in my text into Character Map as it normally read.

So, if you are looking to include vertical text in a right-to-left language, you will need to remember to not reverse the order of your letters, with a notable exception:

"Ki Tetze"

I changed my sample parshah from "Vayyera" to "Ki Tetze" (כִּי־תֵצֵא‬) when I started blocking out my text. My main reason for this was a shorter name. That said, it's two words, and the last letter (yad) of the first word doesn't go all the way down to the baseline. 

Because I was having trouble getting vertical text in Photoshop, I selected a system font with Hebrew characters and copied my text into Design Space. At first, the typeface I'd originally chosen didn't show up in my system fonts there, but that was because I'd forgotten to refresh the tab to refresh my system fonts index.

Regardless of whether I entered text in Photoshop, Illustrator, or Design Space, I had to play around with line spacing to get the letters to appear as cohesive words, and with the size of my text box to make sure all those letters appeared in the text object. That said, the vertical orientation — and what I could do with it — varied from program to program.

Slanted Text

Because Design Space keeps each text block as a separately editable, but not warpable, object, rotating the text was sufficient to get it to align with the torah scroll. That said, the amount of difference in line spaces, along with the common use of the character yad as a vowel, required me to put "Ki" (kaf-yad) on a single line, with "Tetze" following as a separate vertically-aligned word.


Both Photoshop and Illustrator have better line spacing, however, keeping my letters as text causes them to handle text rotation differently from Design Space, as well as differently from each other.

Since Design Space treats each text object as a single, image-like object, using the rotation handle to rotate my vertical text ends up perfectly aligned to my slanted rolled parchment, even though each letter is on a separate line. If I place each letter on a separate line in Illustrator, rotating my object will cause my letters remain upright, but indent each line to follow the object's slant. 

Both Illustrator and Photoshop have text-orientation toggles that let you type normally, but format your letters vertically. In CS4, which is the (admittedly-ancient) version of Creative Suite I'm working with, the toggle is under the "Type" menu in Illustrator. In Photoshop, with the text tool selected, it's a small "T" with vertical and horizontal arrows that appears just to the left of the typeface selector on the text ribbon. That said, I had to rasterize my vertical text in Photoshop — making it ineditable — before I could rotate it. 

Finding New Faces

Being that I'm looking at doing some more artistic work with Hebrew text, I looked for and installed several dozen different free Hebrew typefaces I found at sources such as WebToolHub, FontSpace, Free Hebrew FontAlefAlefAlef and the Open Siddur Project. I was looking primarily for a couple of faces in Hebrew "script", of which I had none in my collection, as well as some variations in display fonts that would make for interesting (and potentially marketable) items.

These showed up nicely in Photoshop and Illustrator as expected, but didn't show up in Design Space until I saved my project and reloaded the tab.

Dates?

I'm sufficiently unfamiliar with the system of using Hebrew letters for numbers that it's going to take some more work before I'm able to complete the left-hand scroll with a reasonable sample Hebrew date.