As part of my career development grant I decided to enhance my skill set by completing a screenprinting workshop. Several of my projects lend themselves to the screenprinting process and I wanted to see what was possible.
I chose to do the screenprinting workshop at Mother Drucker print studio in Kreuzberg. In November I had a print of Mette with Phone created there and had found Dolly to be very knowledgable and relaxed. The list of artists she has printed for is quite impressive and there is a nice collection of their work on the Mother Drucker website.
Day one of the workshop gave me a new appreciation of the screenprinting process. I never knew how much time was involved with creating the screen and the image to go on it. The silk screen is covered in a light sensitive liquid that is left to dry in the dark and then the image (usually printed onto oiled paper or acetate) is exposed using uv lights. The light hardens the emulsion where there is no image and immediately afterwards you rinse out the remaining emulsion – the ink will go through the washed out places and you’ll have your image.
I chose to print from photographs so I learned how to separate my image files in Photoshop into different colour channels. In a four colour print each colour is printed separately using the basics of black, magenta, yellow and cyan (CMYK) and once all printed the colours merge to give an image that looks like the original. Screens can’t pick up tonal graduations so all tones have to be turned to black. To give the illusion of tone Dolly showed us how to create a halftone or Bitmap version where tone becomes represented by a series of black dots in various sizes and spacing. Much like how you see all the dots in a black and white newspaper if you look really closely.
Ink, or paint, is pulled through the screen onto the paper building up layers from lightest to darkest until you have the completed print.
The printing table where ink is pulled over the screen, creating the print.
Ink, lots of ink.
Couldn’t resist capturing this portrait of Dolly as she helps another student with some difficult cutting work.
Preparatory prints laid out on the light table ready for the screen to be exposed.
The screen is exposed using UV lights. A vacuum system holds the screen against the images tightly and keeps it from moving during the process.
Happy Accidents
Dolly would call it a ‘Happy Accident’ when something didn’t quite go as planned or you were just doing a rough print to pull some leftover ink through and you ended up with a surprisingly lovely and interesting artwork. My favourite piece from the workshop was a two colour print where I didn’t pull the ink across hard enough leaving the lower colour showing through in some areas. It’s a photograph of my friend, muse and fellow artist Ed Edgar doing that thing with his eye that only he can do.
I love happy accidents. I always call it synchronicity. The art becomes a collaboration with a greater force outside yourself, some mysterious element, and that really gets my curiousity going especially when the results are something that delight and surprise me. I always try and build in space for happy accidents to occur in my work and there is a lot more scope when something is a hands-on process. It’s the handmade element that drew me to screenprinting. As much as I love photographic prints, so much of photography is done sitting at a computer, the final product digitally printed without the sense that a human hand has touched the print. It was great to transform my images from a digital form to something handmade with paint.
Not everything I made that I liked was a result of an accident. I created the below image showing chiming tibetan bells using a single gold colour on white paper. The gold comes in a luscious powder form and it is mixed into a transparent ink. It looks like molten… well, gold before it is spread through the screen and onto the print where it appears quite irridescent (difficult to capture in a photograph).
The tibetan bells, also called Tingshas, are used at the beginning of Buddhist meditation to focus the mind for practice and then afterwards to bring the mind back to reality. They produce a clear sound often thought to have a cleansing and relaxing effect (I have found this to be true). The subtle nature of the gold ink on the white paper echoes this peacefulness.
Detail, photo slightly darker to show the iridescence.