Monoprints on a Repeatable Matrix... also dandelions.

The final project in screen printing was a monoprint, which means we use the printing process to create one-of-a-kind images. There are a lot of ways to do this, but the way I chose was to create a repeatable matrix, which was basically a stencil made of a piece of clear acetate that I taped to my screen. Very high tech, people. My stencil was dandelions, because I like how other-worldly they look when they're poofy.  And I wanted to make the connection between the shapes of the poofy dandelions with the star patterns. 

Once I had this stencil set up, I drew directly onto my screen with water-soluble crayons. I changed up the background colors and the patterns to create the feeling of different times of day. I have ordered them so they can be read as a progression of end-of-day to night.

This process made a lot more sense to me than the other screen printing projects because it felt more direct. Instead of bothering with screen fill and photo emulsian, I could just draw on my screen and print that. 

I don't know if screen printing is for me-- I am a painter and I like to touch the images I am working with. It felt like a lot of extra tools and chemicals to create something that I could make faster and better by hand. I don't have a strong desire to create my own multiples of images when I can just scan them and order prints. Screen printing is great for clothing, but I don't have a strong desire to put my art on clothing. Looks like me and screen printing were not meant to be, and that is ok.

CMYKin' it up

The second of three Screen Printing projects was a CMYK process-- using only photoshop, a laser printer, and four colors, we were able to create photorealistic screen prints! It is a pretty cool process, but incredibly challenging to line up. It has to be pretty darn lined up to not look crappy. I made 18 prints. Do you know how many I correctly aligned? About 4. Apparently this is common for a first try at CMYK. The image I chose was a photo taken on Glover Day 2011 in Glover, Vermont with two other ladies from the Bread and Puppet Brass Band:

The four colors are Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. In photoshop, we take a photo and separate it into those four basic colors, print them out on transparencies, burn those images into the screen, and then print cyan ink on the cyan image, magenta on the magenta image, etc. They come out looking like tiny dots up close. Check it out:

So are we doing a process by hand that computers already do a lot faster with a lot more accuracy? Perhaps. But a seasoned screen printer can take this process and create new and interesting things that computers can't do. 

When I was printing, I did all the cyan layers and I was like, "ok, this looks pretty good" and then I did all the magenta layers and I was still like, "ok, still pretty cool" but then I added yellow and they totally came to life and blew my mind and I was like "YEAH!!!" It is pretty amazing how these three colors interact to make a much broader color spectrum... But then I added black and that is where the alignment issues really show up and I was like, "NOOOO!! It was an emotional roller coaster. 

When the CMYK print is not lined up correctly, like most of mine, they look like this:

This is not a blurry photograph of my print. It looks like that in person too. Up close you can see it is all a little bit off:

Some of my favorites were actually test prints that I did using only one color at a time. I wish I had done a few of those on nicer paper. They look like aged photographs. 

CMYK!

The Most Interesting Mistakes

I am finally finished with my first screen printing project! I have two more projects and one more class in which to do them before the semester ends, so needless to say, I will be going into the studio as much as humanly possible outside of class and my four jobs. But I'll think about those later. The first assignment was to create a painting and then base a screen print off of that painting. I did a super detailed painting of a tall ship which turned out to be incredibly ambitious for a first screen print. My original intent was to photograph my progress as I worked, but I never remembered to bring my camera to class, so you will just have to envision the drawn-out, multi-stepped process I went through to create this finished product. I made so many mistakes that I am pretty sure I made all of them. That's right, all of them in the whole screen printing world. No, I didn't. They are infinite. 

I seem to recall a quote from somewhere that went something like this: "Make the most interesting mistakes you can come up with! Make mistakes no one else has ever made before!" If anyone recognizes this quote and can tell me who said it, please let me know. It summed up so many of my feelings about learning to screen print. Some mistakes I made were incredibly frustrating and others actually turned out looking pretty cool. In this blog post, I want to share with you the most interesting mistakes I made. 

This first one is pretty close to flawless, so you can compare.

This second example was one of my favorite mistakes: The ink in the sky had started to dry before I did the pull with my squeegee, and it gave it a really cool, grainy texture that I love!

The sky in this one however, did not fade the way I wanted. 

It came out blocky instead:

This one is totally misaligned. Don't see it? Look at the corners.

I think it looks awesome. 

There is one weird moment on the horizon, right behind the ship. I actually like the effect, I just wish it had happened at a different place in the composition:

This one moved between the time I lined it up and the time I did my squeegee pull and my print was like, "Surprise! I put the ripples in the air!" They kinda could be clouds though, right?

...right?

This was by far my most infuriating moment. Some mistakes look great, some are salvageable, but where you get a big, ugly line of black schmutz on your horizon, there's just nothing you can do about it. 

All things considered, I deem this project a success! For the second assignment, we are using computers to print photographic images. In photoshop we break down a photo of our choosing into four basic colors: Cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. The computer separates the image out according to the locations and quantities of these colors and then we print out those images onto clear acetate. Those become the images we burn into our photo-emulsion-coated screens. Then we just print those same four colors, one on top of the other and we put the photo back together. It should be a much quicker project because the computer does all the work and I get to do the fun part, which is playing with paint, which is what I studied in college. 

The image I chose for the second project is this one, 

taken during my apprenticeship at Bread and Puppet:

I have always loved this photo, because I think I look really goofy in it. 

I also love the contrast of the serious faces with the bright pink leotards. 

I think it will make a rockin' screen print!

And on that note, I hope everyone reading this blog makes some interesting mistakes of their own!

Vinceward Van Hopper! Edwincent Hop-Gogh?

Hey all,

First-- a quick update on my screen printing class last night: It was SO much better! I am finally getting it! I finished the background of my print and moved on to the ship itself. The sails are done and next I will move down to the hull and eventually the water. And all the rigging-- I'll need to throw that in somewhere. I learned a new way to register each piece of paper (line it up correctly with the screen) and it made my life a bajillion-million times easier. Still no images for you though. Sorry!!

What I am going to write about in this post is a painting that I have in the works-- a new nightscape in oil on wood panel. I am thinking of it as Van Gogh meets Edward Hopper. I'm borrowing from the color palette of Van Gogh's nightscapes and using classic New England Architecture as subject matter-- the same subject matter that Hopper is known for (my work has been compared to his before and I take it as a huge compliment... though admittedly when I first moved to Boston, I had a bit of an artist block because I realized that Edward Hopper had already made all the paintings I wanted to make, so I had to shift in new ways).

So here is what I have so far:

Eh? Eh? Cool, right? Vinceward Van Hopper! Edwincent Hop-Gogh? 

No, no, the first one is better. Vinceward Van Hopper.

So what I am debating about right now, is 1) I want to finish this painting BUT 2) it looks kind of cool unfinished, am I right? There is something appealing about the sketchy boldness of the shapes I already have. I don't think I'll actually leave it like this, but a small part of me wants to. What do y'all think?

Oh and also, this isn't just any old house in Boston. This is MY house. My room is the one on the third floor balcony.

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.