College week 3/2 Screen-printing 2

Second session on screen printing today.  A couple of people were absent which meant there was a little bit more room for us to work.  I had done a little bit of thinking about my image since last week, and had drawn something based on negative spaces around a group of trees, firstly drawn, and second done was matisse- style cutouts.  This morning, with Janie's help, I printed these out onto acetates and put all three images onto a photo screen for printing.  I printed up several prints from the drawn image from last week,  using the paper backgrounds I'd prepared then.  But the more interesting work was to print the new images onto some of my hand-dyed fabrics, and also some loose-weave calico and some transparent viscose which I brought from home.  The acrylic paint needed to be thinned with a medium to slow down the drying time so the paint doesn't harden onto the screens.  For working on fabric you use a special textile medium, which helps the paint to absorb into the fabric without leaving a slightly sticky and hardened 'hand' to the feel of the cloth.

The screens we used were mounted on simple but effective printing boards, allowing the screen to be held steady but 'flipped' up to allow for positioning the paper and replacing it for overprinting.  I will try to make a smaller similar gismo to use with my A4 screens at home.

I had just about enough time to over-print some of the fabric samples in a second colour, and this worked well with the negative/positive screens I had made up.  I felt that the work today was more promising, and that I had got the feel of how to assemble and use a screen, how to mix the paint and medium appropriately, and how to register prints and overprints, also how to clean up afterwards.

I don't think my images were particularly good, nor that they were very well suited to the photo-screen method - I could have worked just as well with cut-out stencils today.  But it was helpful to work with a simple design as practice, and I would feel confident to plan a more complex and subtle set of prints using a photo screen at a later date.  I enjoyed using the screens and I might well return to screen-prinitng in my personal project work later in the year.

I can add some images of my print work here later on.....