A Spectacular Display of Traditional Batik Artwork on High Performance Leggings

Imagine if your workout clothes were fun and beautiful pieces of wearable art, featuring hand painted designs by artists.

For the past 8 months, we have been working on a project where we combined beautiful, inspiring, hand painted art onto activewear. 

This whole project started based on a research which shows that having fun and beautiful activewear inspires women to enjoy their workouts and train more often.

 

We wanted to create a line that will continue to encourage women to lead active lifestyles, and that was how we came up with the idea to combine art on activewear. 

After 8 months of design, prototyping and testing, this is what we came up with:

Photo credit: Jon K. Stoutlager

5 nature inspired designs, that were hand painted, using traditional batik painting techniques by artist from South East Asia. 

What is batik?

Batik is an art form of applying liquid wax and fabric dye onto cloth. Below is a step by step process on how our artwork was created.

#1 - First, the wax is melted in a pot, over fire.

 

#2 - Once the wax is melted, it is filled in an instrument called the 'tjanting'.

#3 - Any excess wax is removed to prevent spillage during the drawing process.

#4 - The tjanting is an instrument used to apply the wax onto the cloth to draw the artwork.

#5 -  The wax is used to draw the entire outline of the artwork, and in this instance, it is two dragonflies.

#6 - Once the drawing is complete, fabric dye is used as the preferred choice of paint. 

#7 - The artist repeats this process several times, applying 4 - 6 layers of paint on the artwork, giving it more depth and character each time.

#8 - Here is a view of the artwork just before it's final layer of paint.

 

#9 - Once the artwork is complete, it is then immersed into boiling water to remove the wax. The finished piece is where you can see a white outline, which are the places where the wax used to be. The paints were unable to be absorbed into the cloth since it was covered with the wax outline - giving you our unique batik artwork via the traditional tjanting drawing method. 

We then reproduced this artwork onto Lycra (Spandex) to bring you our gorgeous leggings. Sneak preview available below!

Get these leggings here: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/seni-by-fit-rebel-art-inspired-leggings/x/13000759#/