Screen Printing at Blenheim Walk

Finally, we got an induction into the screen printing facilities at Blenheim Walk, which will save us having to walk all the way to Vernon Street whenever we wanna do something. It's much smaller, of course, so we had to do our inductions in small groups of six. It was pretty good though. Plus, there's a lot more variety at Blenheim, we can print onto fabrics and there are three amazing printers there, which can print onto canvas and stuff like that. I'm kind of excited about that. The lady who talked to us, Wendy, she seemed really nice too.

The first thing we did was choose pattern screens, we were printing onto simple cotton. there were some really interesting patterns to choose from. I didn't take my camera, or I would have taken pictures of the stages, but anyway.

We had to lay down the light colour first, because obviously, it's easier to print dark over light than light over dark. I chose yellow and purple, clearly an awesome combination.

Here is a scan of my pattern when it was finished. Lovely, huh? I really like it, even if it is a little crazy to look at. Like, whoah.

We then moved on to screen printing using the screen beds onto paper using a screen of a font that one of the members of staff had design. I'll upload this when I go and fetch it from the drying racks. Just know that it's lovely.

-HJ x

Concertina Exercise.

Okay, so this was an exercise that we did with Jo on Monday afternoon, it was interesting for sure. We folded up strips of paper into Concertina style books, and had to put the title of the books we had made over the week in the first box in some visually exciting way using type. Then we would pass it along to the person on our left and they would fill in the next box, and so it would go around the table until it was full. I think Martin was doing very well considoring his right arm is in plaster and he's right handed.


The ones below were another strip of paper, though this time we had to use images, we spent like, two minutes on each frame. Once they'd all gone around, they went around again, and we had a minute to work on top of someone else's drawing and add to it. That was pretty interesting.


I don't know how Disco Stu ended up on mine.

-HJ x

I HAS BOOK

Look at that, I made that all by myself today in the Book Binding workshop with Printroom Roger. It took most of the day, I never really realised how much went into making a book, it's a lot more complex than you'd think!

Anyhow, I really enjoyed the workshop today and I'm well proud of the book I managed to make, I mean, seriously, not bad for a first attempt. I've always wanted to know how to do this, so it's a skill I definately wanna work on. I want to try all different kinds of binding methods and see what I can do.

I'd quite like to try making a book without a hard spine like that, where you can see the stitching and the cover is just sewn right onto it, but it looks like that'll be a project for another day, because I have to have a 32 page book ready for Monday. I should be able to manage that, I hope, and thankfully it doesn't have to be bound like this.
By the way, this is referred to as 'Perfect Binding'. Mine's not perfect but with practice, I could get this down just right.

-HJ x

Stencils

My scanner really wonked out on these scans. I mean, look at that A! What even happened there? Kind of cool effect though. The point of this is to just say that I noticed that the recent printing had left some pretty sweet patterns and colours on my stencils. Thought I'd share them with you all.





That's all x

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.