Screen Printing: Checked
My love for everything paper comes hand in hand with my love for everything printed. And of course, being obsessed with letterpress printing and foil stamping doesn't mean I shouldn't be giving a close look at the ancient art of silk screening.
Screen printing is a form of stencilling that first appeared in China during the Song Dynasty (960–1279 AD). Credit is generally given to the artist Andy Warhol for popularising screen printing as an artistic technique, identified as serigraphy, in the United States.
It is a very simple process that can be easily self-taught, and that's exactly the way I started. But now, as I'm in the process of diversification, I wanted to take my knowledge up a notch. So last week I participated in an intensive 2 day course. And it was totally worth it!
Here I share with you some pictures I took during the class, and a small explanation of the whole process.
First we printed in full black my "do not disturb" Gigi on a transparency sheet. And we also added a text to it in order to practice printing with registration and two colors.
In the following photo you can see a screen set in place to be soaked with photosensitive emulsion.
After preparing two screens with emulsion and waiting until they were dried, we burned them with the two transparencies.
And then we washed them. Here are the before and after pictures.
And we were set up for print! First, we protected the un-exposed part of the screen with masking tape on both sides.
Then we set up the screens on the screen holder six legged monster and started playing with colors on different surfaces.
In Gigi's case, we tried gold metallic color, which is a very dense ink that needed two passes in order to get a nice saturated look.
We then added a second color, black, to the message.
And done!
I'll keep you posted on my next screen printing projects with artists and, of course, with my beloved Gigi.
