Print-making

I went to the print-room with the idea that I would take the line drawing of the street and replicate it onto good paper in order to colour them 20 different ways.

As directed by staff in the print room, I took the drawing, photocopied it making it as dark as possible, cleaned a screen using the chemicals available (b-strip and i forget the other one,) painted the screen in light sensitive emulsion, exposed the image onto the screen in the exposure unit, cleaned off the unhardened emulsion, let it dry and then began to print.



First off you register where you want your paper to be and mark it off with masking tape. This is only really necessary if you are going to print more than one colour which I wasn't but I did it anyway to show the process. You then print your image onto the plastic sheet which sits over your paper initially, this is so you can line up for a second colour. Its not shown in the image above unfortunately...

This is an image of my screen attached to the printing table. This wasn't a difficult process, you just have to clamp and make sure its fixed in place.



The first mistake I made was to use a screen made for fabric printing, this means the mesh is slightly wider. The above print is a result of using a fabric screen on paper and not turning the suction on on the table to hold the paper down. The lines are too think and its double printed.


This image is a result of not being fast enough in printing more, the mesh became clogged and the printing here is faint and broken, I think that might be a higher risk with fabric screens too. But when I got it right with the paper printing screen I made as many copies as I had the paper for as fast as I could and this didn't happen.


This is the final result and a satisfactory print.