Week 6 - learning how to screen print

After an abundance of sit-on-my-arse, trying not to fidget, furious note-making, concentrate-inducing lectures, this week was my first out-of-seat, practical learning workshop......which I didn't understand. Ha! Well, not quite, but I've realised that my brain really doesn't accommodate illogic very well.

I went to the wonderful Print Club in Dalston to do a screen-printing workshop. As many of you may be aware, I do have quite an interest in and knowledge of art, specifically street-art due to my close involvement with graffitimundo in Argentina, where I spent lots of time with artists, some of whom use screen-printing. If I was to give you an explanation of what screen-printing is BEFORE I went to this workshop, what would I have said, really? I think something along the lines of "schmushing paint through a mesh-like screen onto a material, like paper and being able to reproduce that same print each time". Is that an explanation?! I'm not sure it means much of anything.

The crucial thing is, is that I think I thought screen-printing was really easy - just pushing some paint through a stencil and "voilà" - anybody could do it. Ok, in theory, yes anybody could do it but it is most certainly not easy. And, annoyingly even after doing it and it being explained to me, I still felt like Tom Hanks in Big: "I don't get it".

Let me try and summarise as best I can: screen printing is a method in which ink is forced through a screen (a frame with lots of fibres stretched across it) directly onto a surface. The image that is to be printed is photographically transferred to the fabric screen and then acts like a stencil. Ink is then smeared across the screen to pass through the tiny little holes or pores that are made up by the fibres onto the surface you want to print on. You can then just replicate this print as many times as you want.

That all makes sense, but I still don't get it. Its the logical part of my brain that gets all fuzzy when we're talking about an image being photographically transferred to the screen - I just don't get how that affects what gets put onto the paper. The lovely guys at The Print Club who looked after us did a very good job of taking us all through it step by step - it certainly wasn't their fault that I'm just a bit dumb!

However, writing this all down actually helps and talking to people makes me realise that I'm probably thinking about it way too much - its just that I struggle with big, intricate concepts. But essentially its because we were working with photographic images on the screens as supposed to simple stencils but its the same principal. So, in order for the image to be transferred onto the screen, the first thing we had to do was paint our screens with light-sensitive emulsion paint. This essentially coats the screen in order to make it nonporous. Here is the very lovely Craig from The Print Club showing us what to do.

We then left our screens to dry and next we had to prepare our images. This was done digitally (as supposed to drawing) with the Print Club's computer, making sure the resolution, size and bitmap was right. (Bitmapping is making the image either black or white rather than a grey scale) We were all going to do A4 prints of a black and white image that we had prepared and brought with us. Clearly I didn't read the pre-workshop copy because I didn't know we had to bring in something so I was left rushing through my instagram photos to find something suitable. I was a bit annoyed with myself, as you can imagine, although I'm not sure I would have drawn something from scratch anyway as I'm not the best drawer from imagination and we weren't allowed to use images that were not our own. Anyway, I settled for something quite sweet as you will see a little further down.

Doing screen-printing with a photographic image means creating your picture in the negative. Basically anything black that is transferred onto the image will block out the light and white will let in the light. So you are putting a positive onto your screen, thus turning it into a negative but then painting onto a positive (I think this is the only bit I struggle with a little bit)

So we all got a print out of our image in black on a translucent surface. Below is mine taped to some white paper. We then had to do the transferring of the image onto our screens. This is done in a huge exposing unit where the image is placed onto the screen and then light is shone onto it. The light causes the emulsion paint to harden and bind to the fabric and creates a solid layer.

After each screen and image is exposed to the light, we then had to wash our screens with water to get rid of the emulsion where the image was placed and bring up the negative image. This is the section where the ink is pressed through the screen. 

After that, we all had to check our screens to see whether there were any pin holes of light exposed where the ink could get through. If there are any you just have to cover up those bits with masking tape. So before the final stage of actually using your screens and pushing the ink through the image, my screen looked like this.

Finally we were onto the final stage of printing our images onto paper and we were given a lovely choice of colours to use. As we were only learning about one layer screen-printing, we could only pick one colour to use. I was really flustered as to whether to go for a colour or black. But in the end, I did what I always do and picked colour!

The next bit is the fun bit, but still, its rather tricky. You have to clamp your screen to a large, wooden frame so that it doesn't move and then you have to fiddle around with scrap paper and measurements to make sure that each piece of paper you use, for each print stays in exactly the same position.

Once it was my go I stepped up to clamp my screen into place and spread a load of my chosen paint onto the bottom of the screen and then played around with the placement and doing a couple of practise runs. There is a vacuum underneath the frame table where you put the paper so that it sucks the paper still. Once that is done you can lay the screen right down on top of the paper and "squeegee" some paint up, imprinting through the open pores onto the paper. I didn't breeze through it - there is a lot of lifting the frame up, putting it down, pooling the ink etc etc so quite a bit to think about but I can see how once you've really learnt how to do it, its a very slick and interesting process. 

The great thing is, is that once you do a workshop at the Print Club, you are then eligible to have a membership and able to use all of the facilities whenever you want.

We all got to do six runs each of our print so please do form an orderly queue for your copy of my stunning piece "Cleo on the Beach at Longsands". Price on application!!