My first silk screening experience

My mess on the table...

For the last three weeks I’ve been taking a summer class in silk screening my college provided. It was my first

time ever doing silk screening, and it was a lot harder to do than I had initially thought. First off you get wet a lot… or at least we did, since we had to rinse our screens out in such little sinks, and –which I had not anticipated- you have to wash your screen out every few prints to keep the ink from drying in the screen.

So this was my first screen, on to which I exposed multiple images. I chose the Gynoid from previous works, an Automaton Propaganda poster, an image I had tried to make into a wood block at the beginning of the summer, and an image of a woman with VR goggles that I had found in an old PC magazine, with some text I added in PhotoShop. Each of these images were traced with a Sharpie marker, and then photocopied to bring up contrast and strengthen the black. The copies were then dampened with baby oil to make the images transparent, and help adhere them to the screen.

Even though the time I exposed my screen was a bit longer than any of the other students in the class had exposed theirs, about 1 hour and 15 minutes, the emulsion didn’t harden enough, and blow-out occurred in several of the images while removing the softer emulsion. I tried to do as many print of the successful images as I could before they deteriorated too much, and blew the screen out to get ready for the next batch of images.

I plan to revisit most of the imagery in the next batch, as I wasn’t quite satisfied with what I got in the first attempt. I will, however, be shifting over to lithography in the class now, but I will try to find time to revisit silk screening.

"Urban Robo" - woodblock print

Looking back at my early woodblock carvings, I noticed that I would treat the compositions as if they were just line drawings. I would just draw the object of the piece in the middle, and cave everything in and around the lines I drew, instead of utilizing the negative space and carve the object from it.

Looking at the woodblocks of other artists, I realized how I should be approaching the carvings, and set out to put as much in a composition as I could, while keeping large masses of black, and not relying on contour lines. I also added hatching and cross hatching to add value to cretin areas.

What resulted was the first piece that I consider to be part of my label CtrlAltRobot. “Urban Robo”, as I would eventually call the piece, was also the piece that started my ongoing theme of technology, and the focus on robots. It was also the piece that I started to develop my own style that I would try to integrate into all of my pieces.

The robot in the piece was supposed to be like one of those old school robots you would always see in those really old science fiction TV shows, like Buck Rodgers (even though I’ve never seen any of that series), and were essentially what the people living the 1930’s would have imagined a robot from the year 2000 would look like. It’s clunky, gear driven, and obsolete. Its memory capacity is really limited; probably no smarter than a calculator, but it’s frick’n huge, so people are panicking when one shows up in the middle of their city, even though it seems to be posing no threat what so ever. People are just afraid of 50 foot robots

The print displays the citizens of the city looking out of the windows of their apartments, all reacting to the robot in different ways. Some are screaming in horror, some are trying to escape, some are oblivious to the robot, and continue their daily lives. What is the meaning of the robot, why is it here, does it pose a threat?

"Gynoid" - Intaglio

While I was looking through a pile of old magazines for a collage in one of my art classes, I came across an odd and unique image. It was a photo of a woman, passing out pamphlets in the street while wearing a large and bulky sign promoting a newly opened copy center, and a cardboard computer over her head. It was such a weird scene, yet she was able to make it sexy with short shorts and a pair of high heels. The idea of making technology sexy was such a great novelty to me, it was so weird and wacky, and I loved it. I tore the page out and still have it today. A few years later I decided to use my newly acquired skills in the print making form of intaglio to try to reproduce the image in a print.

There exist two series of the print, the first few lack the hatching, and are just the contour drawing. A few prints later minor corrections were made, resulting in the print’s current rendition. I intend to do more with the piece when I have the time.