First Edition Blog // My First Taste of Screenprinting
Print Club loves it when we get people into the studio who then blog, tweet and generally share their experience with us and you lovely lot!
Here’s one from a Tom Love who attended our Beginners Workshop earlier this month.
Print Club London
My first taste of screenprinting
Yesterday I headed up to Dalston for a one day screenprinting workshop for beginners at the famous Print Club London.
The day kicked off at 11am where 12 of us signed in and handed over our artwork to our tutors for the day, Oli & Elliot. Here I ran into my first problem – I thought it was a 2 colour screenprinting course but it was only a single colour course. This meant the artwork I had would look very different to what I had intended but at the end of the day I was there to learn the process of screenprinting rather than come out with a really great finished piece.
What I’ve decided to do is print the zoo stamp in 2 colours on my own and the 3 competition winners will get the 1 colour edition I printed at Print Club London as well as the 2 colour edition when I’ve printed it.
A lot of the day was taken up by explaining different ways you can screenprint as well as showing us some really great examples of professional work.
What I learnt is that 80% of screenprinting is prep work, and can get pretty messy – hence the lack of pictures of me actually MAKING the screen (sorry).
Eventually though, after learning to emulsion, wash, dry and expose the design onto the screenscreen you end up with this…
Now comes the really fun bit – PRINTING!
After clamping in the screen and making sure it’s positioned firmly in place you have to go through a few more technicalities such as – registering your screen to the paper. You do this so you know every time you put the screen down and print, you’re printing in the same place on each sheet of paper.
Now it’s time to get inky and enjoy yourself!
