It’s taken me a while to update this, but there’s been a few gigs and christmas and new years happening. We played I AM YOUR WEEKEND in Liverpool which is rather like atp in one freezing building, and it was good, most good… David provided some intense sax improv during our set which was insanely good. Some great bands played, and Action Beat were amazing of course.
Anyway, here’s the printing process. The first thing I did was to paint some background colours to print over. I wanted to paint mine rather than print them because I quite like having a painterly element in the finished prints.
I used the tracing paper transparency to make a stencil out of cardboard, and taped up the edges to make it withstand more painting action.
I then took my stack of paper, and placed the cardboard template in the centre. Then you can push the point of some scissors or a pen into the paper and indent onto the sheets below; this just means all your prints will be in the same place on the paper.
You can now paint each sheet with the stencil, by stippling paint through with a thick brush:
Once the first colours were dry I took them down and painted a blue background on each.
Now you can prepare the screen for printing, so attach it to the base board hinges. Now make a flap of transparency which will lift up with enough room to let your paper underneath:
This will be printed on so we can see where the paper must sit.
Prepare some ink (I am using acrylic paint mixed with some printing medium, which lengthens the drying time so it doesn’t dry up in the screen) and run it along the edge of the inside of your screen:
Now lift the screen and pull the ink across the screen using the squeegee – this is called flooding the screen.
Now, making sure that there are some pushpins at the corners of your screen to make sure the screen sits a little above the paper, lower it and pull the squeegee across the screen to print onto the tracing paper underneath:
Now we can put the paper under the tracing paper and line up the image with the background:
Once it’s aligned, tape some bits of card to the base board at the corners of the paper, so that you can quickly place a new sheet in exactly the right place each time. Now remove the tracing paper thing, and prints away! Make sure to re-flood the screen between prints, to ensure it doesn’t dry out. You’ll probably be able to do between 10 and 20 sheets before the ink starts to dry up in the screen and needs to be washed, depending on how quickly you can work and how good your ink is.
Here’s some of the finished Quadraturin prints:
I was pretty pleased, the stenciled backgrounds worked well, and mean that each print is quite different. It’s definitely better to colour the backgrounds first and print over the top, because if you try and colour over the top it takes away some of the crispness of the printed linework.
These are now on sale on my website here, along with a couple that are without the blue background colour:
Which I think look pretty cool as well.
Currently Listening to: Flying Lotus – 1983, Los Angeles
