One Week Book - Screen Printing

 We completed our drawings on the two sheets of kodatrace and were ready to have our screens exposed as they had already been prepared during our induction. 

Blue layer

Orange layer

Both layers overlapped

Exposing the screen meant that anything black would block the UV light getting to the screen. The clear areas where the light could get through would go hard so when we wash the screen afterwards, they would not wash away. We washed the screen using a sponge to make sure the light sensitive emulsion had gone from all the areas we wanted it to and we then left the screen to dry in the drying room. 

Washing the screen

We applied tape to the edges of the screen inside of the frame where the emulsion hadn't reached and also taped off the part we weren't printing yet because we didn't want the colour to go through these gaps too. 

Taping the screen

Holding the screen up to the light, we could see some marks what we didn't wan to be printed so we concealed with some more emulsion and placed the screen back in the drying room.  

Concealing marks with emulsion

When the screen was dry, we clamped it to the vacuum table and lined up our paper marking the corner and edge of the sheet with masking tape so we knew where the it needed to be positioned in future. We then applied the printing ink which we had mixed earlier (two spoons of paint for one pot of printing medium), we put it in a line at the top of the screen so it could be dragged down by the squeegee across the image. We printed the yellow/orange colour first because the detail of the blue needed to be on top of this. 

First layer of screen print

We printed as many sheets as we could to use up as much of the ink as possible, when we had finished we washed the screen with soapy water to get all of the ink off. We then put it in the drying room to prepare it for screen printing with blue. When we got it out of the drying room, we removed the tape which had been covering the blue stencil - we learned we should have done this before drying the screen but in this case, the screen wasn't affected. We taped up the edge of the yellow stencil and then clamped the screen back onto the vacuum table. We lined up the two colours and completed the same process as before with the blue ink. 

We had a few issues with the colour bleeding and running so we printed onto some plain paper until the print quality was back to normal again. These smudged prints made some interesting effects which would be difficult to recreate in the same way. Screen printing seems like a really good way to get a lot of things printed the same (well, very similar) but it is happy accidents like these which makes you realise how individual each print is. 

At the end of the printing process, we had to clean the screen again, the same as before and remove all of the tape. I then volunteered to strip the screen so had to wear all the protective clothing and use the chemicals, hose and jet washer to strip the emulsion from the screen so it would be ready to use for someone else. 

Below is an example of one of our final prints which I then folded up into the book. When folding the book, I measured out the size of each page again so I knew exactly where the folds needed to be.