Screen Printing - Part 02

My first real go at Screen Printing //

As part of the live Secret 7 brief, I decided to experiment with more traditional methods of print. 

At the start of the day I didn't have much of an idea of what I was doing. I have screen printed before but it was a while ago and it didn't grab me at first.

After being shown how to prepare my screen, it was ready to expose my images.

I designed a pattern based on some of the imagery taken from the lyrics of the song. The song reads 'My heart was wrapped up in clover'

To prepare the screen, I had to design the pattern in black. Any of the black ink would then show up on my prints and anything left blank would be white.

One problem I came across was that in order to do a two colour print, I would have to have two different versions of my design. One version should only include the hearts and the other the clovers.

To tackle this I cut out the pictograms I didn't want to show up on two separate designs. This meant that I could then repeat the process again afterwards and fill in the missing design.

  

Above is my prepared screen with both versions of the design on it. I have started by taping over the clovers as I printed the hearts onto my stock first. The tape over the clovers prevented any unwanted ink coming through onto my stock.

So that I could line up each attempt in the same position I used a layer of translucent paper and printed onto it. This then allowed me to gage where it would print onto the page.

After a few attempts, the design started to come out more and more faded. After asking why, I discovered that it was because the ink had dried a little on my screen. This will be due to the fact that I didn't know exactly what I was doing and so took me longer. To solve this, I had to clean the screen and try again. This time it worked a lot better.

  

I have produced a number of outcomes so that I can choose the best one to submit. It also gave me a chance to test out the second layer of colour.

Adding the second layer of colour worked perfectly. I managed to line them up so that it replicated the original pattern.

As the brief asks for a record sleeve design, I have traced the net of a sleeve and made both a positive and negative. I will then use this to cut out my design and produce a sleeve.