Screen Print Workshop

I prepared my screen printing positives last night so they were ready for today's workshop. This is what my design looked like on Photoshop. 

I then used the techniques learnt in the digital workshops with Mike Flower to separate the colours of my image and make sure they are printed in black toner on white paper. The one on the right will be the lighter colour which I will print first. The one on the left will be the second layer of colour, preferably black or a dark blue or green. I left my colour options quite open because I presumed we would be sharing screens and some I would have to share inks with someone else.

These were some of the outcomes from the workshop but all of them can be seen in my sketchbook. The printing of the first colour went really well but when I came to print my second colour, I notices some scratches on my screen where the light sensitive emulsion had been washed away where it shouldn't have. This created some streaks across the left hand side of my image which were printed in black.

The image on the left is probably my most successful print of the day because it is lined up well. I produced numerous others which were okay but the alignment was not spot on. You can clearly see the black marks on the left hand side where something happened to my screen. I am not sure how this actually happened because the printouts that I exposed were fine and I only noticed this when the screen was set up to actually begin printing. This was disappointing but it probably meant I was less precious about my outcomes and took more risks towards the end. 

I briefly tried printing on coloured paper. I actually really like how these have turned out. Because the brief states that it is two colours plus stock, I could have fun with adding another colour here through my stock. I like the aged look of the image on the left, it has made me start to think about old paper and consider textured surfaces to print onto. 

This was just some experimentation with creating confusion, printing the second layer upside down.

I was just playing around at the end with adding another colour into the printing ink.I tried to add a streak of pink into the black which you can see very faintly in the left image but didn't have the dramatic effect I was hoping for. The pink is stronger on the right but by this time I had run out of first layer prints to print on top of so this is just the top layer. By the end of the session my screen was clearly becoming clogged with printing ink and medium which meant the quality of my last few prints suffered a lot.

Overall, today's session has been enjoyable but I don't think that screen print is a process I want to continue with, especially not in this way. Although my design was hand drawn and then scanned in to photoshop, I think it lacks character so it might have been better to try this with hand drawn positives so it is a less digitised process. I haven't connected with this process as much as I have with linocut and mono print so I am most likely going to continue my experimentation with these. Since my experimentation with mono print I can see my work having a nice element of texture which I don't think could be replicated as I would like in screen print.