Taking Hand Block Printing To The Next Level With Digitization

 

For over 100 years our world-famous art of hand block printing has taken over again, the art has now become as much as popular and in demand as it was in the old times, so why do we need to improve it or take it to the next level?

Because trends change with time everything must adapt to it, in today’s digital age and with growing customer demands, hand block printing shouldn’t be any different.

Today we will discuss reasons for the digitization of hand block printing and how we can achieve it. We at  Shivalaya Jaipur welcome you to our blog.

Hand block printing

Traditional hand block printing is our art that we have been proud of for centuries; we also know the art as bock printing or woodblock printing. The art is popular in many East Asian countries including China. So what is hand block printing?

Hand Block Printing is our traditional art of printing on textiles using wooden blocks that are carved into beautiful designs; the bottom of the dyed block is repeatedly pressed on the fabric. The result is a stunning masterpiece.

Indian Block Print Fabric can be finished into Kantha quilts, cushion covers, table covers, shirts, and many more. You name it and it can be made in block printing.

Block printing: Reasons for digitization

Customization: - In modern times, where if you don’t give a custom product, you won’t be needed anymore, thus making custom textiles has become essential. We are not saying that the traditional method doesn’t allow customization; we are only saying that it takes a lot of time.

To give you an example of Block Printed Kaftan, first, a block needs to be carved with the desired design; then dipped into a custom dye and then stamped on the fabric which is woven into the Kaftan. All this process is done by hand and it takes a lot of time. Even some block printed designs are not traditionally practical, for example, a 12 color print requires 12 blocks and 12 people to make.

With digitization, we can eliminate the time consumed in creating a design and then re-creating it if the customer doesn’t like it.

Types of fabrics and dye: - In the traditional method of hand block printing, we can only print on cotton or silk and the types of dyes used are also very limited. But with the introduction of digitization in block printing, we can print on any type of fabric, such as cotton, viscose, silk, wool, polyester, polyamide, etc and we can also use various types of dyes such as reactive, pigment, acid and disperse, giving us even more opportunities.

How we can achieve it?

Adding the power of digitization to hand block printing will only make it much better, not the art, it’s our best, but the technique will become much faster and labor un-intensive, but our artisans aren’t going anywhere, we will train our hand block artists to work with digital machines.

Digital printing machines can be set up with hand block printing tools to achieve technique improvisation while keeping all the properties of original hand block printing such as the traditional designs and patterns, comfortable colorfast fabric, and our unique culture showcased in it.