A series on screen printing and artistically living
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Screen printing has my heart for 3 hours of the weekScreen printing has my heart for 3 hours of the week

I have invested a chunk of money and a slice of my time to screen printing class. This week, the whole 8 of us stood around our completed prints and discussed the choices we made and the challenges we faced moving along our ideas from sketch to screen to print. The instructor had prepared us for this exercise in previous class times. I heard plenty of them murmur their approval of the idea. Yet, when the time came to begin, every single other person was timid and silent, except me. I just had a feeling this would be the case. And I don't quite mind it, but why should the responsibility of vulnerable ice-breaking fall to me? I'm not especially outspoken, I didn't have much to say, my art print was puny, I took no chances, so why did that span of silence choose my voice to break it? Ugghh people.... Ughh artists...let's be starters every once in a while?

Well, I plunged in anyway. Of my own print, I said it was tough to line up the elements of the image that I had broken apart in order to ink them in various colors.

My instructor noted that next time I could give myself more allowance. Beginning with light colors first, blocking out the shape, then with each new layer, adding complexity and deepening hue. A good thing to do is to have these layers overlap, dark over light. The final piece should be what's called a key block, a borrowed term from linocuts I think(?), which is typically black and defines lines and shapes. Okay, so now I know that.

With the rest of class time, I continued working on my next, more ambitious, art print.
It's four colors! And it follows the rule of light to dark. And I used a reference image, so that helped.
Here are the first two layers:

And here is the completed screen which shows the negative of my final layer, where the detail is:

The instructor demonstrated a split-fountain ink pull because a few of us had asked how it's possible to create a gradient. There is a transparency fluid ink used for this purpose, it's ink that hasn't been pigmented. I used it in the second layer of my print, hoping to get variations across the blooms of my orchids. (Could you tell it was orchids?)

where does the time go?where does the time go?

There are three class sessions remaining. I can hardly begin to hope for what I can do with screen printing once the class ends. I intend to create my own space dedicated to the craft. I intend to produce t-shirts that you would like and possibly buy and wear. But how crowded out the week becomes with all the commitments of the moment!

I do love crafting with my hands, and I do believe this is the most valuable sort of work that I want to do, but my first love, writing, is hanging out in the backseat and pestering me for attention. I would love to disappear into a fictional world and describe it in great detail to you, and I hope that day comes around. Perhaps this summer.