Autonomous Substrates Week 2

For week 2 I developed my idea of LED light tattoos further by working on the stand using the Stretch Powernet Fabric Latte. As the material is flexible it gave me the idea of stretching it across the body so that it looks like another layer of skin onto so that the tattoos actually do look part of your skin. I heat pressed some patterns that I extracted from my research on the fabric so that it did actually look like I had a tattoo. This was very successful, not only did the print came out really well on the fabric but the fabric colour matched my skin colour so it was perfect to document by taking pictures of the fabric on my arm with the pattern as a mock up.  Working on the stand was very successful because it helped me to also create a silhouette for the shape of my top. However, I could of developed this further bt using different materials to drape with such as the latex to show a variety of how the materials would of worked on the body. In addition, when it came to printing onto the latex it would melt onto the heat press and no image would transfer onto the material. I really like stand work on the left and in the middle however, I don’t think the one on the right is as successful as the other two as its quite a simplistic design and I have seen this shape may of times in the past, I want to create something new to go with my new technical idea.

I then went onto actually texting the LED lights onto the top to see if it would actually work. I believe that it was a successful job as each pf the lights worked using a parallel circuit to add as many lights as I could. However, it become annoying when having to have the laptop at the side constantly it was heavy so it sometimes made it hard to add the lights and keep them in place when trying to attach them to the garment. In addition, it was also annoying that you could see the lights through the top, however, I came to like the wirer’s as it would give it a more Industrial effect. I could develop this further ny gathering loads and LED lights and attaching them the the whole top to see if they actually look like tattoos or not.