Tuesday, 24 May 2011

Printing: new frames and old screens

As both the Textiles Foundation group and the Advanced Textiles group are currently preparing for their end of year exhibitions, the college has suddenly run short of the frames needed to make printing screens. James kindly made me two brand-new frames using some cheap wood from B&Q, so all of my new screens are now ready for printing.





I still have my old screens from last term, (I ripped them off thier frames in order to reuse those frames). It seemed a shame to throw them out though, especially as it seemed that they could still be used for printing.


I don't have any screen-printing inks at home, so I experimented with drawing ink and acrylic paint. I laid the screens over paper and just painted on top of them. As the screens were no longer being held taut on the frame, and as I wasn't using a squegee to apply the the paint or ink with an even pressure, the resulting prints were uneven and sometimes bled outside of the lines of the images. However, I got some good results using black acrylic paint on a blank greeting card I had lying around. The card had a Liberty fabric design on it and the clean, bright floral graphic contrasts satisfyingly with the irregular skeleton print.


No comments:

Post a Comment