Screen Printing

I am always interested in new ways to present my work and this weekend I took part in a screen printing workshop which included screen printing photographs.

The focus on the first day was screen printing using handcut stencils and I focussed on making prints inspired by my photographs, adapting images which I felt had strong, bold shapes that would transfer well to a print using three tones.

The images below show the initial process of sketching the print and then creating the stencils for each layer to attach to the printing screens. The middle row of images shows the prints I created and the bottom row shows the corresponding photographs.

I find it very difficult to create designs when I am put on the spot but I am pleased with the results and for a first attempt I think they have worked well.

In the bottom left print, I didn’t print the first stencil close enough to the right edge hence it runs to the edge of the left side of the paper, and the bottom right print had a mark on the screen which created the white spot on the black print.

On the second day we moved to using photosensitive emulsion to expose photographs, but we began the day by creating hand drawn prints which would be exposed in the same way, but which allowed us to embed finer details that when using stencils.

My inspiration came from the trees at Glasgow Green and I subsequently added a traditional stencil print to represent the snow. Drawing is not my strongest skill!

Finally, the photographs.

This is the part I was particularly interested in, screen printing photographs. The best results come from higher contrast images and the files need to be set up as black and white bitmap, although you can subsequently screen print any colour.

I chose to print two images from my recent publication The Anticipation, and it was great to see how the bitmap image generated such detail when screen printed.

It was a fantastic weekend and opened my eyes to new ways of presenting my work, and screen printing is now something that I will be looking to incorporate in future projects, both photographs and prints inspired by my work.

Many thanks to my wife for gifting me the workshop for my birthday, and to David who runs the Mobile Print Studio… I will be back.