Whilst at uni, I loved any form of printing, particularly screen printing, so I thought I would have a go, in a very minimal, hand made kind of way, no way I can buy an actual exposure unit as they are MEGA bucks! I know I can make stencils and hand paint onto the screen itself to block it so I bit the bullet and bought some stuff from Handprinted.co.uk.
Here are some pics of the kit I bought (Handprinted.co.uk) and of my attempts (many failed!) of both using the drawing fluid (green) and the screen block (thick red which you can squeegee over your drawing fluid and then wash out your drawing fluid, OR - which I have found the most useful so far - simply paint onto the screen with).
drawing design onto screen with pencil -
painted in with green drawing fluid -
all ready to go! -
Squeegee through the red screen block -
Wasn't convinced I had enough block on! So I gave it another pass (or two?!) , definitely NOT a good idea it was sooooo thick it was hard to later clean off resulting in a small tear in the screen, lesson learnt :(
washing out -
50/50 paint to medium mix -
Trickiest things I have found so far are - getting the right angle and amount of grunt when pulling the squeegee, ink drying quickly in screen especially when hot and sunny in room (learnt to spray with water and wipe out with a rag after EVERY pass, annoying but worth it) and LINING UP the paper to the screen given that I've just got a make shift set up with hand clamps and have to reposition the screen every time . . . . . . .
First tries with a paper stencil (cut out bits where ink needs to pass through), only lasts a couple of times before the paper buckles at edges though, then have to remake
Pretty pleased with these, used the same stencil and just repositioned it randomly over the paper to make a couple slightly different ones -
