Problems with printing

as i knew the digital print room would be fully booked after easter i made an appointment before easter a couple of days before our final crit, making sure i would have my would to show on the day.
though i was ready to print my designs, i had not considered what size resolution would be appropriate for the idea of a jigsaw. i printing out at a3 as i thought this would be more striking and appear like a final piece but thinking about it now, i feel my concept would be much stronger on a smaller scale - would be able to sit in a box to appear like a jigsaw you would find commercially.

problems i encountered when printing.

• i added both the full illustration and the jigsaw pieces of the t-shirt onto my pen drive so i could add them to the computer in the print room, when trying to open my designs, only the full illustration would open. i decided to print out 2 copies of the full illustration and then cut out the jigsaw pieces after. though this wasn't the end of the world, i found it very difficult cutting out the shapes to fit the jigsaw without a worked guideline. i feel this made the pieces and the whole final piece look rushed and not done to a high or professional standard. 
• choosing paper stock- i wanted a thicker paper to print the jigsaw pieces onto to replicate what they would be like commercially. however there wasn't a thick enough paper that i felt would stop the pieces bending or becoming misshaped. i just used the thickest paper available. annoyingly, this paper came off a roll and even when printed it was still curved and would not lay flat, making it impossible to cut out, let alone make up the jigsaw! 

instead i used the same paper stock as the portrait illustration (what the jigsaw pieces sit on) for my jigsaw pieces. this paper stock is not ideal as it is easily torn and bended but it will lay flat  which means the concept of creating a jigsaw is obvious. 

• low resolution - i realised after printing that the illustrations inside the t-shirt were really pixelated, this was really annoying and confusing as purposely drew each illustration as a big scale and scanned them in at a high resolution (600) to make sure this wouldn't happen. however a peer mentioned that this has happened to them when scanning things in at a high resolution and then shrinking them down. 

though i do not have another print session due to how booked up the print room is, i plan to develop my final piece, learn from these mistakes listed above (think about what stock to print on first, consider size and context of the pieces, resolve the pixel problems) and use the drop in print sessions to reprint.