Ella 8

Over Easter I got some help form a friend that runs a printing company so i could test of my designs on high quality printers. the images were printed on banner material which has a slight cross hatched texture to it and highlighted the problem with adding textures in Illustrator. The digitally created textures look good when printed on a smooth flat surface but when combined with another texture look confused. The whole point of the texture is to create a crafted and aged feel to a digital image, if the textures clash with the surface they are printed on it has the opposite effect and makes the image look false.

I printed off 3 different versions of my poster altering the texture and brightness.

the first print came out way too dark, the character is completely lost in the composition and some of the tones in the picture have disappeared completely. I like the level of the texture added to the image but at this level it has a detrimental effect on the images colour balance.

I used the texture of cracked plaster on a wall for this version and overlaid it at an opacity of 60%. Once again the character has come out too dark and the colours look over saturated. 

this print has been lightened in Photoshop and is the best of the three in my opinion. It still has some problems and needs to be tweaked. Alice does not stand out enough among the bring colours around her, I need to change the tones of her skin and hair independently from rest of the image. Although this was not successful as a final print process it helped me to figure out some problems that i could not have foreseen working only on screen.

• The tones I used for the Alice character need to be tweaked.
• Printing onto textured surfaces is a bad idea for this kid of digital texture.
• the effect of the overlaid texture seems to be stronger when printed compared to on screen.
• the border overpowers the image adding unnecessary darkness to a bright composition.
• I need to find a balance with adding textures. I like the way the textures add a crafted feel and mute the colours slightly but need to find a way to do this without darkening the image too much.