Confessions of a Screen Printer

Today I used my new screen printing equipment for the first time. With my son’s 6th birthday looming I decided to screen the invites to his party, I really wanted to give the never-used-before-equipment a go. The process is simply using speedball ‘screen drawing fluid’, and speedball ‘screen filler’, and completely cleaning the screen between each new drawing for the next colour.

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You can see the print above with just one colour, but here it is with two colours. Complete with mis-registration!

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Things I learned today are:

How much extender base to use to get the right transparency in the ink (the blue was the first colour I tried, and when I got to the yellow I’d just about figured it out, which was around 50/50 consistency). When I next buy extender base, I will buy a BIG one.

It’s easier to draw the design onto the screen first rather than ‘tracing’ by eye through the screen (the difference is that if you don’t draw onto the screen first you are using one eye consistently to view the image from above, which I found to be a bit of a strain).

No matter how much I lined my paper up to the registration cards I stuck in, I found it best to ‘pause’ flooding the screen, put the paper under, put the screen down, check registration, lift the screen again then flood the screen ready to pull the ink. The ink/mesh seemed fine while I ‘paused’, it didn’t clog up.

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And, there's always the happy accident, here's one without the blue, and it's growing on me, I think I may prefer it!

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Things I tried along the way, but didn’t turn out the way I wanted:

I tried using a ‘stencil’ method, of cutting out areas (this is suppose to be good for simple areas – like the 3 bears for example), the I had a reoccurring problem of the paper warping, and ink smudging. The paper I used was a baking paper; I think it was too thin.

Things I will be really looking into:

Designing to get a third colour from a mix of two colours, this is really not easy. I can feel a ‘still-life’ coming on to try this out.