Laurel Schwass-Drew

I am an art educator and a printmaker, specifically a screenprinter; I do my own designs on T-shirts and similar garments, which I started on many years ago (before the internet was available to the general public!) and have recently gotten back into doing. I have also delved into printing woodcuts on garments with fabric ink last year, using an etching press with an adjustable-height top roller, which is a newer venture for me that is still in progress. The past few years I have rediscovered Dharma as a great source for all things fabric art related!

My favorite Dharma Products are the water-based fabric screen printing inks and paints. I use all the ones carried in the catalog -- Speedball, Jacquard, Versatex, Lumiere; and my all-time favorite product has become the Discharge Paste, which I use alone, and also with fabric inks. This can be seen in the "Food Chain" image of scissors and other tools chasing each other all around the navy blue shirt, and also in the tan shirt image of the "Chevy Nomad-in-the-desert" scene. I've gotten some of the black T-shirts from Dharma to play with. The catalog and website have been invaluable in researching how to do processes I am not as familiar with.

This summer I tried my hand at dyeing a bunch of T-shirts. I had not done much larger-scale shirt or other fabric dyeing, only some small experiments for past fibers classes, and I was pleasantly surprised at what great results I achieved. What motivated me to try the fiber reactive dyes was the Dharma sale on the "oddball" dye colors, back in the spring of this year (and my rather large pile of light-colored shirts that I felt needed jazzing up!).

I took it as a personal challenge to pick a few of the oddball colors and a few of the regular colors and make them work, and "Wet Rhino," one of the oddball colors, turned out to be my absolute favorite! I love the blue-brown-green-grey shades marbling throughout the fabric, and I feel it accents my printed images very well (the second image, with the windup
squirrel printed on it, was over-dyed in "Wet Rhino"). Now I feel that if I could get the Wet Rhino color all the time, it might just make me want to dye even more garments myself!

The other 2 images I have submitted that have Dharma overdyes on them are the Palomino Gold "Art-School Test Drill" shirt (an all-around print of an electric hand drill), and the Deep Sage Green shirt with a 4-color print of an old Buick "Chrome Car" front grille on it. Dyeing is fun! I was lucky enough to get a few copper tjaps a couple months ago, and will be experimenting with those as well. The next products I want to try out are the InkoDye and InkoDye resist -- probably screenprinted and also stamped with my tjaps. I can't wait!

The kind of imagery I have been doing runs the gamut from old cars to tools to old printing machinery, like the Howard cast-iron etching press T-shirt shown, all of which I have a personal fondness for. And squirrels (Long story short, making squirrel T-shirt images has helped me have better garden karma, they now leave my bulbs alone!). I do whatever appeals to me, but a theme I have been fascinated with recently is how utilitarian things and places can have a decorative element about them, even though they are used for hard work, mundane activities, and sometimes even grungy tasks; and how noticing and experiencing that sometimes subtle decorative aspect can uplift our daily lives. This is related to my interests in architecture, and industrial, product and typographic design and their history.

I think many of us artists are feeling nostalgia in this faster-paced digital era for old places and things, along with older, slower hands-on ways of making, that makes us more fully appreciate and savor the creative moment. I have also just been in love with fabric, its decoration, patterns, and related pursuits like sewing, weaving, embroidery, altering/designing, printing, painting, drawing, etc., since I was a young child. My process is that I usually photograph the elements I want and/or collage them. For my woodcuts, I use simple shapes, which come from hand-drawn shapes or textures. I like to make black-ink drawings to use for screenprinted images too.

I am currently working on a set of Yoga-inspired T-shirts for my fellow yogis at the studios where I attend classes; these will be very simple, nature-related images on the front and back of the shirts. I look forward to creating a larger portfolio of work, and one of my greatest joys is seeing people wearing and enjoying my designs.

Sincerely,
Laurel Schwass-Drew
Philadelphia, PA.

L•S•Drew•Graphics