Picked up the sails from Marcus at Bristol Sails and was just a short walk over Hannover Place with the two sail bags to Puppet Place which was our studio space for this project.

Before that I had picked up a hired projector from Spike Island to use to project the sail pattern design on to the sails themselves. In spite of our attempts to black out the space as much as possible, the bright light coming in on this very hot and very sunny day made it really difficult to make out the projected design in spite of having a pretty powerful projector. Sam did a pretty could job of transferring the outlines on to the sailcloth in spite of the light. I could barely see a thing!

The other challenge was that the ink tended to bleed in to the fabric, creating furry, blotchy edges rather that the nice crisp edges I’d envisaged and how they came out in the trials on the little scraps of sailcloth. We worked out the issue was because we were using a lot of ink to cover the big areas so there was just a lot more ink in the fabric to bleed out. The solution, we discovered was to paint the outlines several times with a dry brush to build up layers of colour and then infill the big areas with a big fully load brush. The painted outlines became a buffer stopping the ink bleeding out.