Screen Printing, First Attempts

My posts have been seldom these days, but don't think that means I'm not making new work. In fact I am steadily learning the process of screen printing. I don't have much to show yet because screen printing involves many layers that you apply step by step. 

The first step was burning my screen, which involves photo emulsion: a very expensive, light sensitive, bright green goop. You apply a thin layer of it to your screen and then let it dry in a dark room, the very same kind of dark room that photographers use. At this point, if you were to rinse off your screen, the photo emulsion would rinse right out. If you expose it to light, the goop solidifies in your screen and is no longer water soluble. Cool right? SCIENCE! 

To burn the initial area that my image will go in, we used an 11" x 15" piece of black paper, to block light from the middle of the screen. Picture a giant, high tech light box with a flat, glass surface. You put your paper on the glass, you put your screen, coated with photo emulsion on top of the paper. Then you close the cover of the light box, which is black rubber. You press a button and the rubber cover is suctioned to your screen as your screen is being blasted with light. It takes maybe thirty seconds. When it is finished, you can remove everything from the light box and rinse your screen. Wherever the light has touched your screen, the photo emulsion will not rinse away, but where the black paper was blocking light? Rinses right out! You are left with a lovely rectangle in your screen, where your printing ink will pass through. Think of it like a stencil. A very expensive, high tech stencil on a nylon screen (this process used to be done with silk, but now synthetic materials are preferred by many).

This whole process takes a really long time, especially when there is only one light box, and only one sink, and your class has like 16 people in it. But we all completed it! Yes! Then we mixed our ink colors. Most people started with one color, but since I am working with a design with a multi-colored background, I had to mix multiple colors. So many colors!! 

I printed all of my sheets (I'm starting with 20 of them) with my initial background colors: red, orange, and an off-white in stripes that fade into one another. I don't have any photos, but they look like candy corn. 

After a successful first day of screen printing, I went to the sink, grabbed a spray bottle of liquid soap, and started spritzing my screen. Then I looked down at the bottle in my hand. It in fact had a giant label that read, "PHOTO EMULSION REMOVER." I was like, "NOOOooooo......!!!!" But it was too late, my carefully applied photo emulsion and burned rectangle were already melting away like ice cream on a hot sidewalk. I felt like Lucy from I love Lucy, baking cookies for Ricky's important party or something, dumping in all the sugar, only to realize that I was actually holding salt... or something. Whaaaaa!

SO I had to prepare my entire screen all over again. But if this had to happen at some point in the process, this was a good point at which to happen: I had only done a rectangle and nothing more complex or painterly or detailed. Once I finally re-did my screen, I mixed the next layer of colors and tested them out on newsprint because I didn't have enough time remaining in class to do my actual prints, so here are my test prints:

The goal of printmaking is usually to get a series of prints that all look the same, but as a painter, the little variations really interest me. I'm wondering if that will hinder me in this class. Oh well. Also, it was unintentional for these test prints to look like the French Flag, but check it out!

Next class I will layer these French flag colors on top of my candy corn colors, and hopefully it will look like the sky. 

Watercolor Class

For the last couple weeks, I have spent every Wednesday evening at CSMA taking a class about painting landscapes in watercolors. I work mostly in oil so I thought it was time to switch it up a bit. Plus, as I have said before, I love painting landscapes.

I have worked in watercolor plenty, but I have never been officially instructed in it and I am having a lot of “ah HA” moments in class, where I think, “ So THAT’S how you get that effect” or, “I could use this technique to do THIS.” So that's been awesome and I have a lot of new ideas for future artistic experiments. Sometimes I like to think of every artist as a mad scientist/inventor, laughing maniacally at themselves in their mad art/science labs as they create the perfect color or composition or concept to test out. Experimentation is important in life and in art, I believe.

On the other hand, learning about watercolors is making me long to paint in oil. Painting with oils is so smooth and easy and magical, whereas watercolors are unpredictable and well, fluid. Those qualities are part of the appeal of watercolors! I am just realizing that working in oil is like a language I speak fluently and I just don’t know how to say as much with watercolors yet. 

Let me show you what I’ve got so far:

We started by painting evergreen trees just to see what the medium is capable of and play with different effects. These are all my evergreens. My favorites are the top left corner and the yellow and red ones.

Then we used deciduous trees to play with washes and removing sections of paint once you put them down. Watercolor is such an involved process!

Here are more deciduous tree experiments. I dig 'em.

Then I did these practice trees at home.

I think I was subconsciously channeling this Counting Crows album cover (the Counting Crows being my favorite band from high school):

And Counting Crows aside, I completed one whole landscape, based on a photo I took in France:

Now that we have practiced all these fancy shmancy techniques in class, we are headed out to pretty places around Ithaca to paint en plein air, as they say, so there will be more watercolor landscapes on the way!

Oh, and one last thing-- I wanted to put up my latest oil painting for comparison with all these watercolors. It was so foggy and gorgeous the day I painted it-- magical!!