Just another blog. Does there need to be another one?

I was at The Print Center downtown a few weeks ago for Museum Day when I came across a book that I’ve seen many times before: Print Liberation’s The Screen Printing Primer. It was just staring at me, daring me to do it. Why couldn’t I screen print? I remember doing some designs back in high school and it was a lot of fun. Ok, let’s do it!

I bought the book and started gathering up my supplies. It took a while to make sure I got everything, but mostly I just had to make sure I set up a system that worked in my apartment. There were a few things going against me in the one bedroom that I live. For one, I don’t have access to a basement, so there’s no “darkroom.” Second, I didn’t have a work sink that I could dirty up with paint and emulsion. And of course space was a problem. But eventually I collected everything that I needed and got to work.

This past Sunday I started the process by coating my screen with emulsion. I didn’t have a “scoop coater” (although I should, they aren’t too expensive), so I just used a spoon and squeegee to spread the emulsion fluid as smoothly as possible on both sides of the screen. Turns out I didn’t do it very smoothly at all and you can only go over it so many times before you just have to live with it. By the way, this has to be done in the dark as the emulsion is light sensitive. Once the coating was done, I put the screen over a box in my closet and closed the door. Very high tech.

Turns out you have to wait a day for the emulsion to dry, which is kind of a bummer because I was hoping I could take a Sunday to bust out some sweet ass prints (I think I just blushed typing that). Oh well, I’ll have to Monday evening.

Fast forward to tonight when it was finally time to burn that images onto the screen. It was nice of the Print Liberation folks to include a few of their designs in the book as transparencies so that you can try it all without having a design of your own. I decided to use their “DON’T GIVE UP” design that they are known for. It was perfect because I actually thought about buying one of their shirts at their store in Northern Liberties, but if all goes well, now I won’t have to. Again, super cool of them to put their design out there like that knowing that people will probably be printing it all over the place, especially on shirts.

To me it’s a great slogan. It’s ambigious and maybe that’s why it works, but to me “DON’T GIVE UP” means not giving up on whatever it is that you want to do. Almost noone starts with their dream job or profession right off the bat, usually getting to that level requires a lot of work on your craft. While doing this, it’s easy to give up and just fall in line with whatever job you have at the time, whether it’s working at a restaurant or in some dead-end office job. So “DON’T GIVE UP” is just a simple slogan that’s pretty good to live your life by. You may not be where you are right now, but keep working and keep moving somehow and maybe it’ll work out for you. The only way you fail is in if you give up. That’s what it means to me, but to you maybe it means DON’T GIVE UP on life. Or maybe it means nothing to you and you think it’s stupid. Moving on…

To expose the image onto screen, you place the design between screen and a light source. It helps if you place a sheet of glass on top of the design to keep it in place and close to the screen, as shown below.

The lamp that I used was a three-headed monster that I put three 100 W bulbs into. The book suggested a light source that could handle 500 W, but I didn’t really want to invest in one. Instead, a decided to throw in three bulbs with an intensity greater than suggested on the stickers on the lamp. It explicitly stated that I shouldn’t do such a thing, but I did it anyway. Luckily nothing caught fire later (spoiler alert). Perhaps I’ll invest in a better lamp.

With the help of a Speedball (the company that I bought a lot of the supplies from) tutorial, I calculated pass on the wattage, size of the screen and distance from the light to the screen that I should keep the light on for about 16 minutes. Besides the charts, it was just an educated guess on my part and being my first time I was prepared with doing this all for nothing and having to start over.

But this turned out to the right amount. After the sixteen minutes, I rinsed the screen in the shower and took it outside to our backyard. I don’t have a basement, but at least I have a hose and drain in my little copplestone backyard that turned out to be pretty handy. I rinsed and rinsed the screen and it first it seemed to be all for nothing, the image just wasn’t dissolving through the screen. But then as I concentrated more on the faint letters, the emulsion began to dissolve away how it should. I held the screen up to the setting sun.

It worked! It actually worked! There were a few holes, but for the most part I had the design as I wanted it and the light was only coming through the area that I wanted to print.

My next step was to take a painter’s palette knife and cover up the small holes with some emulsion

This didn’t take long to dry and finally it was time to print.

The Speedball screen that I purchased came packages with a hinge system that was easy to screw and worked perfectly.

And there you have it! I only printed a few sheets, but it came out pretty well. On closer examination, the print isn’t perfect and crisp on the edges, but that’s what makes screenprinting so great, the imperfections.

And that’s about it. I rinsed all of the ink of the screen outside (it was dark and cold out there now) and called it night. But tomorrow I’ll bring the print out again to make a few “DON’T GIVE UP” t-shirts. I’ll make sure to post about that tomorrow.