PRINTS: REFLECTING THE ETHNIC DIVERSITY OF INDIAN TEXTILE ART FORM
Indian Prints & Paintings have been a exquisite art form
since ages, capturing the authentic beauty of multicultural India. The
country has the oldest and continued history of art in all artistic
manifestations, be it Painting,
Sculpture or Architecture. Here often art has been depicted through natural
organic mediums which is easy on the eye and yet shows the artistic creativity
in abundance. The grace and elegance have been maintained from Stone Age to the
Neo Modern Day.
THE PRINTS JOURNEY
TEXTILE PRINTING:
The process of
covering a fabric in definite patterns or designs by applying colours is called
Textile Printing. The colours are bonded with the fabric to resist friction and
washing. In a way printing can be related to dyeing where the whole fabric is
uniformly covered with one colour whereas in printing one or more colours are
applied to it in certain parts only and that too in sharply defined patterns.
In Printing Stencils, Wooden Blocks, Rollers, Engraved Plates or Silk Screens
are used to place colors on the fabric. Colourants used in printing contain
dyes thickened to prevent the color from spreading by capillary attraction
beyond the limits of the pattern or design.
Popular Indian Textile printing forms are Kalamkari,
Bandhani, Batik, Nandana, Ikkat , Sanganeri , Bagru and Bandhej.
Kalamkari remains the most
popular Indian textile printing form. Kalamkari is a hand painted or block
printed technique on a cotton or silk fabric using natural dyes. Kalam means
pen and kari craftsmanship in Persian. It's a old craft practiced by the
natives of Andhra Pradesh. There are two distinctive type of Kalamkari
art in India , one the Srikalahasti style and the other Machalipatnam
style. In srikalahasti style the "kalam" or pen is used for free hand
drawing of the subject and filling in the colours is entirely hand worked,
where as machalipatnam involves both painting and printing. The outlines
are printed with carved blocks whereas the interior portions are filled in with
vegetable dyes using the kalam. The shrikalahasti style draws inspiration from
the hindu mythology and depicts the religious structures, gods and heroes
whereas the machalipatnam style potrays an intricate plethora of motifs and
wildlife forms. The production of both the forms is similar to a
large extent, the technique consists of a painstaking process of resist dyeing
and hand printing. It involves seventeen meticulous steps for the shrikalahasti
style and tweleve laborious steps for the machalipatnam style. Kalamkari
continues to epitomize the inventive dexterity of the Indian artists and the
wisdom of this ancient civilization who found materials in nature to express
their creative beings and honour esteemed persons among them. Actually in
ancient times groups of singers ,musicians and painters called chitrakattis
moved village to village singing and narrating hindu mythological stories, also
illustrating the accounts using large bolts of canvas painted on the spot using
rudimentary means and dyes from herbs and plants. This led to the birth of
Kalamkari which was patronized by the mughals and the Golconda sultanate. After
declining for a while it was again revived and the Britishers also formed an
interest in this decorative art for clothing. In the intricate kalamkari art
process the fabric is immersed in a mixture of myrabalam (resin) and cow milk
for an hour to get its glossiness, contours and reasons are then drawn with a
point in bamboo soaked in a mixture of fermented jagri and water. One by
one these are applied along with the vegetable dyes and different colours to be
washed later. Each fabric can at times undergo 20 washes; also various affects
are obtained using cow dung, seeds, plants and crushed flowers.
Distinct Methods of Printing:
Hand Block Printing: In this process a
design is drawn on or transferred to a prepared wooden block, where a separate
block is required for each distinct colour in the design. The block cutter
carves the wood and the block presents the appearance of flat relief carving
with the design standing out. Fine details are very difficult to cut in wood
and maintain while printing and wear down often, they are therefore invariably
built in strips of brass or copper,bent to shape and driven edgewise into the
flat surface of the block. This method is known as coppering.To print the
design on the fabric, the printer applies colour to the block and presses it
firmly and steadily on the cloth ensuring a good impression by striking it
smartly on the back with a wodden mallet. The second impression is made in the
same way taking care to see that it fits exactly to the first. Each succeeding
impression is made in precisely the same manner until the length of the cloth
is fully printed. When this is done it is wound over the drying rollers, thus
bringing forward a fresh length to be treated similarly. If the patterns
contain several colours the fabric is usually first printed throughout with one
colour then dried and printed with the second and repeated until all the colours
are printed. Block printing by hand is a slow process, however capable of
yielding highly artistic results some of which are unachievable in other forms
of printing.
Perrotine Printing: Perrot of rouen in
1834 invented this block printing machine called Perrotine, which is
practically till date the only successful mechanical device ever introduced for
this purpose. Although block printing has been mostly replaced by roller
printing, its still popular in French, German and Italian works except British.
For certain classes of work the perrotine possesses great advantages over the
hand block for its rate of production enhancement and the joining up
of various impressions to each other more exactly without breaks in continuity
of line can be noticed in well executed works. But perrotine can only be
applied to patterns containing not more than there colours nor exceeding five
inches in vertical repeat, whereas hand block printing has no such limitations.
So perrotine is considered best for utilitarian character and hand block for
decorative work of print designs.
Engraved Copperplate Printing: Thomas
Bell of United Kingdom in 1770 invented the printing of textiles from engraved
copperplates. The presses first used were of the ordinary letterpress type, the
engraved plate being fixed in its place. In later improvements the well-known
cylinder press was used; the plate was inked mechanically and cleaned off by
passing under a sharp blade of steel, and the cloth instead of being laid
on the plate was passed round the pressure cylinder. The plate was raised into
frictional contact with the cylinder and in passing under it transferred its
ink to the cloth. The great difficulty in plate printing was to make the
various impressions join up exactly. This could never be done with any certainty;
the process was eventually confined to patterns complete in one repeat and was
made obsolete by roller printing.
Roller & Cylinder or Machine Printing: This
elegant and efficient form of printing was further patented by Thomas
Bell in 1785. Bell's first patent was for a machine to print six colours at
once but this incomplete development was not immediately successful, although
the principle of the method was shown to be practical by the printing of one
colour with perfectly satisfactory results. The difficulty was to keep the six
rollers with each carrying a portion of the pattern in perfect register with
each other. This defect was soon overcome by Adam Parkinson of Manchester, and
in 1785 only Bells machine with Parkinson's improvement was successfully
employed by Messrs Livesey- Hargreaves- Hall & Co. of Bamber Bridge,
Preston, for the printing of calico in from two to six colours at a single
operation The advantages possessed by roller printing over other contemporary
processes were three: firstly, its high productivity, 10000 to 12000 yards
being commonly printed in one day of ten hours by a single-colour machine,
secondly by its capacity of being applied to the reproduction of every style of
design ranging from the fine delicate lines of copperplate engraving and
the small repeats and limited colours of the perrotine to the broadest effects
of block printing and to patterns varying in repeat from 1 to 80
and thirdly the wonderful exactitude with which each portion of an elaborate
multicolour pattern can be fitted into its proper place without faulty joints
at its points of repetition
Stencil Printing: The art of
stenciling is relatively new. It has been applied to the decoration of textile
fabrics from long by the Japanese and of late years, has found increasing
employment in Europe for certain classes of decorative work on woven goods for
furnishing purposes. The pattern is cut out of a sheet of stout paper or thin
metal with a sharp-pointed knife, the uncut portions representing the part that
is to be reserved or left uncoloured. The sheet is now laid on the material to
be decorated and colour is brushed through its interstices. It is obvious that
with suitable planning an all over pattern may be just as easily produced by
this process as by hand or machine printing, and if several plates are
used then as many colours as plates may be introduced into it. S.H Sharp
patented in 1894 a single colour stenciling machine which consisted of a
endless stencil plate that passed continuously over a revolving cast iron
cylinder and between the two the cloth to be ornamented passed and the colour
was forced on to it through the holes in the stencil mechanically.
Screen Printing: Screen
printing is by far the most used printing technology today. There are
two types of screen printing, one is rotary screen printing and the
other is flat (bed) screen printing. A blade squeezes the printing paste
through openings in the screen onto the fabric to print designs.
Digital Textile Printing:
Digital textile printing is often referred to as direct to garment printing (DTG)
.This is a process of printing on textiles and garments using specialized or
modified inkjet technology. Inkjet printing on fabric is also possible with an
inkjet printer by using fabric sheets with a removable paper backing. Today
major inkjet technology manufacturers can offer specialized products designed
for direct printing on textiles, not only for sampling but also for bulk
production. Since the early 1990′s the inkjet technology specially
developed water-based ink (known as dye-sublimation or disperse direct ink) and
has offered the possibility of printing directly onto polyester fabric. This is
mainly related to visual communication in retail and brand promotion (flags,
banners and other point of sales applications). Printing onto nylon and silk
can be done by using an acid ink. Reactive ink is used for cellulose based
fibers, such as cotton and linen. Using inkjet technology in digital textile
printing allows for single pieces, mid-run production and even long-run
alternatives to screen printed fabric.
So the Print art has truly evolved with the Time and use of
Technology.
Manjul Thapliyal
Principal Consultant
Visions Ahead
Web: www.visionsahead.com
This article can also be viewed at http://www.articlesbase.com/art-articles/textile-printing-reflecting-the-ethinic-diversity-of-indian-art-forms-6430102.html
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