Blueberry Park

Screen Printing Course Lesson 3...

For the first time since starting the course, I initially came away from today's session feeling despondent. Fortunately I quickly put the nail on the head as to why this was. Each lesson is just 2 hours but we pack so much into it. In the previous 2 weeks we focussed on learning and using one skill and for the first time today, we had to use what we had learnt in those sessions whilst learning a new skill.

I'm really pleased that (yet again) I have quickly learnt that it is such early days (impatient? moi?) and it is going to take so much time to master and be able to perform all these skills naturally.

Since last week's lesson I knew I wanted to experiment with photographs and also text, so I have spent most of the week photographing flowers and then cutting around them. I had no idea what the effects of these were going to be, but hey, it's all about the process isn't it? (I learnt that last week). Again, with the text, it didn't matter too much what was written, more seeing the effects when turned into a screen-print. (Go to the top of the class, Karen.) I used a couple of the different font stamps that I have, as I wanted to see the effects of these and found a quote from my favourite children's book...I'm sure you know where it's from...

When we got to class, the focus of the lesson was Paper Stencils. As well as producing a screen with photo emulsion, you can produce a crude screen from cutting shapes from paper and fixing this to the screen. This method is great for block colours as a base for printing something else over.

As usual I was astounded by the effects of something so simple. Here's Gina's example below. A simple rectangle was cut out and then with the use of 2 or 3 colours an amazing background to use in a design has been produced.

I forgot to take a photo of my paper stencil print, but from the screen above, you can see what I set out to do. I cut a large rectangle for the flowers to sit on and then cut 2 smaller 'windows' to highlight the larger text. First print was of the yellow (the one I forgot to take) and then when that had dried I printed over with my screen with the text and photos.

I should at this point tell you that whilst all this was going on we had to prepare our screen, the photo emulsion way, to use for the second layer. And this is where I started to take my eye off the boil. This process is one that we have done for the past 2 weeks, but in isolation, focussing on just that. This week it was a by-product within the lessons objectives. I didn't have any problems with the actual screen, but where I did fall into difficulties and realise was an area I need to focus on, was the actual printing motion. I'm quite relieved to know that this is all very natural and next week, whilst learning yet another new technique, we are going to put emphasis on the actual printing. Hurrah!

Whilst I'm not overly happy with how the flowers have turned out (the bottom left didn't take at all) I love the effects of using this idea and particularly love the use of stamped text. And even more so with the paper stencil block printing highlighting areas. This is definitely something that I will be pursuing.

Lots done already and still HEAPS to learn and do...