Mono Printing and Screen Printing

So most of these are pretty basic, it was my first time with mono printing. We didn't exactly have the facilities at my last college, it was pretty good fun though. Although the colours and patterns always looked way more epic on the sheet than it did on the paper. I suppose it depended really on what press you used. Anyway, as you can see in the image above, I just wrote the alphabet onto the slide using my fingernail, though I didn't think about how it would come out backwards and all that, so I had to flip it on the computer. Lack of judgement right there.

This was actually the first one I made. You can't see from the scan, but because my stencils were made of cardboard and not paper, they were embossed into the print, which was a pretty neat effect, although it did leave a white space around each letter where the ink couldn't touch the paper, so the stencils weren't as crisp as I would have liked them to be.


These two were what was lefton the newspaper from the back of the sheet, which got filthy. Seriously, it is impossible to get them clean, because you're hands are dirty and just ugh, mess everywhere. Not the good kind of mess either, that kind of greasy grossness.



Three variations of the same slide, on different kinds of paper. You can kind of see the embossing on the last one, if you look closely. As you can see, the ink got fainter the more times I used it, obviously
I love the colours in this one, and kind of wish I hadn't scratched the A intto the ink behind the stencil. Kind of ruins it. Oh well, you learn from your mistakes and all that jazz.

This is my favourite one. The stencil was left green from a previous print and really stood out against the purple. I printed it onto tissue paper as well so it came out pretty vivid.

I did stacks of prints, no joke, but a lot of them didn't actually include the letterforms, just some pretty sweet colour blends and grungy backgrounds that I can use in photoshop at a later date. Anyway, onto screen printing.

My last screen printing experience wasn't fun, seriously, resulting in an angry Scottish dude yelling at me for something that totally wasn't my fault. It kind of put me off and I never returned to the Westward Ho print room ever again. Plus I thought that he might eat me or something if I ever showed my face there again. Very scary for a small man.

ANYWAY. We had to take our favourite mono print, which I pointed out, and photocopy it twice and all that. On one of them we had to edit it, like, really make it pop by blacking out areas and adding white highlights. The image above is the result of my editing. I love the tree roots, they're pretty sweet.

We did a load of prints of the unedited one after putting it onto the screens, using magenta, which looked pretty good. I wish we'd kept one sheet of the prints as they were when they were just magenta, but we didn't. We then put the edited version of the print on some more screens, and then mixed up some cyan, and laid that over the top, obviously the edited parts leaving different marks and standing out against the magenta in places.

And this is the result. Unfortunately, my tree roots didn't stand out as much as I would have liked, but I really like the overall thing. It really looks like one of those pictures you have to look at with 3-D glasses, it's got that slightly unfocused, fuzzy look to it. I enjoyed screen printing much more this time around, even though the screen beds are huge, and you kind of struggle to reach if you're a short-arse like me. Really glad I did it though, and I'd like to go back for more printing at some point.