Silk Screen Tutorial Part 5 – Finally! Pulling Prints!

Before you begin, make sure you set up all your equipment. You don't want to be scrambling around in the midst of printing. Also be sure to have an area clear for your wet prints to dry. A drying rack works well.

Attach your hinge clamps to the table or a large piece of wood. Tape one side of the large acetate sheet down to the table.

Check your screen for any holes where ink might leak through, and patch them with masking tape. You can also use screen filler if you want, which you can buy at the art store.




Clamp your screen. Prop up the corner with a roll of masking tape and spoon a line of ink onto the bottom of the screen. With your squeegee, push the ink to the top of the screen. This is called "flooding". You need to flood after each print you pull because it prevents the ink from drying out and gunking up your screen.



Now pull a print! Using your sqeegee, apply firm even pressure as you pull towards yourself. You want to print the image onto the acetate first and use it as a guide for all future prints.

Arrange your paper or shirt under the acetate and line up the image where you want it to be. Then flip up the acetate, lower the screen and pull the print. I usually go over it twice. Definitely do a few practice runs on scrap paper first. Add more ink when you need to. You’ll get a feel for it after some practice. Here's a video of me doing it to give you an idea of speed and pressure and all that stuff.

As soon as you’re done printing, use the spatula to scoop up the excess ink from the screen and put it back in the jar. The get to cleaning the screen! You do not want to let the ink dry in the screen. Warm water is ok, but hot could still damage the emulsion if it’s fresh. Hold the screen up to the light to be absolutely sure the stencil is completely clear.

Don't forget to clean off the acetate so you can reuse it. Just water will do the trick!

Now repeat this process for the other layer(s) of your design.

And here are a few more random footnotes:

• If you've printed onto fabric, you need to iron the image. If you don't it could fade in the wash.
• In terms of sufaces to print onto... different surfaces may require different amounts of pressure, or more or less pulls with the sqeegee. For example, if you're using glossy paper, you need less pressure, because too much will cause the ink to bleed. You have to experiment a lot. Generally speaking, I'd say more absorbant surfaces are easier to work on.
• If you're pulling lots of prints, your screen can dry out after a while. This is where the squirt bottle can help you out. Using a few squirts and a sponge you can gently clear any parts of your screen that are getting blocked by drying paint. Then pull a few prints on scrap paper until the consistency is good again.
• I usually keep my screens permanently. But if you want to wash it out, do it ASAP. The emmulsion is really difficult to remove and if you wait more than a couple days, it's pretty much impossible. You have to use the special emulsion remover I mentioned in the materials list.
• If you're using the same screen to do multiple colours, sometimes the squirt bottle trick will be enough to clean the screen and start the next colour. But if you need to rinse the screen in the sink, you can speed up the drying process a lot with the use of a hair dryer.
• If you need to, you can touch up your prints with a paint brush.
  
  

Worst Day of the Month!

So I thought I'd post my photos from Undercover today because I'm trying to get in the mood to be creative. Instead, sadness stalks the land, because apparently I deleted the photos from my camera without putting them on my computer first. I have searched and searched all the folders and the recycle bin, and they are gone gone gone. And I am so so sad. I don't know how this happened, but there you go. I won't be able to re-take the photos of my classmates and peers who participated in Undercover, which really sucks. There were some amazing costumes there! I still have my costume of course, although it's a bit worse for wear after the commute home. I'll try to arrange a photo shoot, if someone is willing to help me out. But shit, you know? Shit! I do have this one photo that I happened to post on Facebook before the senile deletion occured. Unfortunately, all you can really see is the veil. But hey, that's something.

Undercover

My next big and exciting project was a costume! It's for an annual event at OCAD called "Undercover" and it's basically a fashion show/costume contest. I decided to make a tutu out of unconventional and dangerous materials. I did ballet for many years, and I wanted to express the masochistic side of this art form with my costume.

This is the pattern for the bodice, which will be corseted and made out of patern paper, which resembles skin. I made the pattern by wrapping duct tape around my torso and cutting it off.

This is aluminum mesh intended for screen doors. It will be filling out parts of the tutu.


This red wire will act as the bones of my corset.

I would never exclude broken mirror in such a project!

This mesh and chicken wire is bunched up to mimic the gathered tulle you normally see on a tutu. It's hard dangerous work bending this metal to my will!

Here's a piece of the tutu, with the chicken wire attached.

I'll also be making a birdcage veil, somehing like this.

Or maybe like this?

The Quilt... The Tears

The quilt came to a painful end I'm afraid. All was going well, until my sewing machine began breaking down and getting jambed every ten seconds! I even bent my nail back trying to open the damn thing up. I also planned to have the three panels as one piece, but I couldn't figure out how to turn the inward facing corners, and had to rip the quilt apart. It was an unreal series of unfortunate events. When I finally finished sewing the thing, I went to press it with the iron, which randomly spewed out mega heat and burned the central panel of my quilt. I replaced it with a non-quilted centre panel for good measure. What an epic!

My design plan, before I cut it up and ironed it on the strips of fabric.

One of the side panels. These ones turned out the best because the fabrics were easy to work with.

The burns! Can you believe this?

This is the replacement panel for the centrepiece... minus the quilting unfotunately.

At least I took a photo before I burned the thing.

Resplendant

This is the culmination of several weeks of work in my graphic communication class. We had to choose an animal and turn it into a graphic form using the confines of a grid. I choose the resplendant quetzal, a beautiful iridescent bird with incredibly long tail feathers. Next we had to take the first letter in the animals name, and morph it into our logo form in a minimum of sixteen steps.

And finally, we had to compose a poster with these sixteen pieces... a poster which communicates some aspect(s) of our animal. I choose to represent the quetzal in its environment, which is high altitude cloud forests. The paper I used for the background has a swirly cloud like pattern and the large surrounding shapes are intended to evoke an airy forest. I also wanted to express the quetzals fragility by choosing the most delicate shapes to make up its body. In terms of the colours, I choose green for the background because it's a natural and organic colour that is dominant in forests. I choose to use black for my images because I knew it would stand out better than any other colour. Since the quetzal is such a magnificent bird, I wanted it to really pop off the page. I used gouache to paint it, cause black gouache is my hero.

Bread and Roses

Guelph-Wellington Women in Crisis have organized an annual juried art exhibition to celebrate International Women's Day. They posted a call for entries from comtemporary women artists, and I figured I may as well answer that call. The show will be titled "Bread and Roses" after James Oppenheim's poem of the same name. The poem refers to the Lawrence textile strike which took place in 1912. This strike for better wages and working conditions was led to a great extent by women.

I entered this piece and now I get to wait in agonizing anticipation for the jury's verdict. The exhibition is looking for art that celebrates women and highlights then need for continued action to secure and maintain women's rights. I thought this piece would fit the theme of the show because there's a certain violence present, as well as sadness, acceptance and transformation. I get the sense that the girl in the picture is somehow assaulted, yet very wise. But I say too much. I love to interpret and explicate my own art, but then I remembe that I hate interpreting and explicating my own art.

The show will be hosted by the Alma Gallery from March 3-11. Wish me luck!

Grouper: Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill

I owe a few good discoveries to Pitchfork, but Grouper has got to be in the top five. When I began checking out their list of the best albums of 1998, (many of which were a let down for me), I tried out Grouper, who ranks at number 37. Here is what they had to say about her album:

"Grouper is Portland, Oregon's Liz Harris, drenched in so much reverb that she sounds almost intangible-- like a voice calling up from the bottom of the ocean. On Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, Harris' third full record as Grouper, a few meager shafts of light are finally allowed to penetrate the mix: A gently strumming acoustic guitar reappears regularly, and Harris' words are, for the first time, occasionally discernible. These tiny hints of accessibility are just enough to deepen the music's essential mysteriousness, to make us feel tantalizingly close to Harris before she's gone again, the echoes of her breathy coo humming in our ear." --Jayson Greene

I couldn't put it better myself. She's a new favourite for me. You can listen to one of her songs here, or read more about her on her label's site, Type.