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.
