So this week I started printing my digital images for the
Orison Dome.
My plan has been to have all of the hexagons on the dome done with screen print, and all the pentagons done with digital dye sublimation. I finished the screen prints in May, and they turned out great. To see those, go
here. Now it's time to work on the pentagons.
Digital fabric printing is this amazing process where a large scale printing machine prints actual dye onto the fabric surface. The images turn out just like photographs, but are immersed right into the thread of the fabric.
I've been working with hieroglyphs and sacred geometry images for the base of the prints. The geometry is cut out of photographs taken at two different arts festivals I attended in 2013,
Harvest and
Firefly. The surrounding pattern is a digital pattern I made from photographs of exploding super novas.
I really wanted to create calm images that felt universal but also in line with my own spiritual path, and reference some of the landscapes and places of my own personal experience. Going from a sense of place, to the vastness of the cosmos, to patterns believed to make up the elements of life.
Once the prints are done, they get rolled up into paper and put into a very hot steamer for a few hours to set the dye.
Then they get unrolled to revealed the final product!
Even though the prints are really large, they're still not quite big enough to fill the whole pentagon shape, so they needed to be edged.
I decided to dye some fabric to complement the other green shade stars, and also so that the fabric would have a little bit of texture to give the edging a forest-y feeling to mimic the prints.
So much more work to do, but they're starting to come along nicely!
