Bima Wear Training on Bathurst Island – Bima Wear goes Digital!
Over the last few months Zise has had the wonderful opportunity to train the ladies at Bima Wear how to Digitise and Design their screen prints on the computer.
Over a total of five weeks the ladies have been learning and practicing using a Digital Camera, Adobe Illustrator and Wacom Tablets. Using these tools and software, the ladies have created new designs for their screen prints and have also fixed up and re-digitised all of their older prints from the last 40 years.
In total the women would have designed well over 100 new designs and re-digitised and fixed more than 50 old screens. This is an incredible accomplishment!
It was a very exciting development and we thoroughly enjoyed our time at Bima Wear. We have made life-long friends and wish the Bima Wear Women the best of luck in the future and look forward to our next visit!
The Bima Wear Women - Unfortunately three of the women are missing in this photo.
Here is an example of one of the pieces that was completed using Adobe Illustrator and Wacom Tablet
And Another one!
An example of a re-digitised screen. A photo was taken of the original screen and then digitised with Adobe Illustrator and Wacom Tablets.
Here is another screen that was fixed.. this was a hard one.
History of Bima - http://www.bimawear.com/
From the Tiwi Islands – Bathurst and Melville Islands, in the Arafura Sea about 80km north of Darwin – a women’s artistic enterprise has been created to celebrate the Tiwi people’s own distinct language and culture. There are currently 17 Tiwi women producing unique fabric prints and sewn garments in brilliant, bold, timeless designs. Fabrics feature traditional symbols, structures, family and environmental representations that are central to Tiwi culture. Dedication and morale is strong among the workers, who proudly call themselves ”the Bima Wear ladies”, with most having worked at Bima Wear since leaving school. Eight have worked there for more than 30 years, with three working since its inception in 1969. Along with constantly developing new fabric designs, the Bima women also produce fine art prints on paper, single and multiple colour linocuts and etchings.