Screen printing start
Saturday, August 30th, 2008
I’ve been recently learning about screen printing, which is something I’ve wanted to do for ages. I love the look of screen printed fabrics and prints on paper. My wife bought me a kit and I started off with a couple of prints onto paper which taught me quite a lot about how much of the various screen printing mediums to apply! I particularly wanted to help Lorna with her textile work by designing and printing fabrics which she could use in her work. The idea was this would give her unique printed fabrics and also the ability for us to design exactly the kind of things she wants to use in her work.
So for my third print, I worked with a photo of grasses I’d taken and produced a design in Illustrator (top left, above) which I was very happy with. This is my first print design to use colour to show a background and thus leave a negative space (the fluffy seeds around the grass heads). So I had two colours to print; the brown of the grasses and the blue of the sky. With my screen printing kit I had only screen drawing fluid with which I had to paint on the design and it took ages (a good week). I must get the photo emulsion stuff!
Anyway, with the screens finally finished (the two right hand photos, above) we printed four copies, two of which came out very well and two of which didn’t come out quite so well. We chose some fabrics to complement the print and Lorna worked her magic to turn them into two lovely cushion covers (bottom left in the photo).
It’m very happy with the final result and the cushions are currently available in Lorna’s Etsy shop. I have lots of new ideas for prints, so we’ll see what happens!
