Now Back to Print Plus.

Screen Printing

Monday 16th January

Blocked out parts of screen to leave only circles, repeated and hand painted background for tie-dye effect

Our first day of the Print Plus block was quite hectic as there were 20 of us all trying to get our screens made up following the instructions given to us by the technician, a lot of queing up and waiting around for our turns went on. we had to pick a screen that had already had someone's work on it, use a chemical to take it off, then wash and leave it to dry. then put another chemical over it and leave it to dry again, we then oiled up our voted screen photocopies using vegetable cooking oil to make it transparent, take that to this large machine where we placed our designs under our screens, pressed vacume and the green button and it magically appeared on the screen (amazing!?) then we had to once again wash our screens. Then we FINALLY started our printing. We mixed up our pigments to go onto our cotton. for the rest of the week we worked on mainly silk using acid dyes, we also mixed those ourselves using the recipes we were given. on the final day (Thursday) we had a print designer come in to speak with us about print and show us more things we can do with our screens. We learnt about mono printing, using stencils & repeating designs. We also hand dyed a lot of our fabric to then print on & used the Devore technique to dye each side a different colour. The final technique I used was discharge, this is where the chemical used takes out the pigment in the dye leaving it the colour underneath, I used this on black cotton and also a yellow silk that I hand dyed myself.