OUGD603: Presidential Campaign- T-shirts

A part of our presidential campaign packs included three blank white t-shirts, with fabric binder and pigment being free for students in the college it seemed silly not to use them as another touch point to spread my campaign's message.

I decided to use the 'vote for Roz' poster as the base for my shirts. The format worked well and took up a good amount of the space available on the tee, this helped grab attention and also meant I could make the message as large as possible. The biggest hiccough was trying to get the right colours and mixing pigments. I took printed swatches to help me when I was mixing though I can't say that mixing colours is my greatest strength. The orange came out well and looked almost identical to the original colour. The pink and the blue however, came out not so well. The pink was passable but I got nervous adding anymore white and red to the mixture as I had ruined several pots of colour previously by going over board with the pigments. Fabric pigments are a lot bolder than mixing paint for paper screen printing and so it was very easy to over estimate and mess the colour up completely. However the final result was a pink similar to the original colour and served it's purpose. 

I never ended up using the blue, there was a severe shortage of white pigment when I was mixing colours and so the result was too dark and no where near bold enough. Instead of wasting a t-shirt with a completely mismatched colour I chose to two of the shirts in the orange I mixed successfully.

This was the first time I had screen printed onto fabric and so I was very thankful to have a friendly printed textiles student nearby who didn't seem to mind when I asked her question after question. 

The final shirts surprisingly came out really well. I'm happy to have learnt a new skill and extended my screen printing abilities. I intend to wear these throughout campaign week and up until voting day to act as a mobile advertisement. It would be really lovely if I could get a few others to wear them too, but we'll see how that goes.