Silkscreen School Confidential: Part One

After two classes of covering the basics, we got down to business today and pulled some paint. For the first project I wanted to do a throw-away (or at least give-away) piece; something I could work hard on but not feel too dejected about screwing up.

So I made some two-colour promo cards to give away at Expozine later this month.

To prep the images, I followed all the rules laid out by the Highwater guys in Jordan Crane’s repro-guide (free download). The main thing I’ve learned so far about silk-screening is it takes a lot of patience. There are many steps involved (more than I anticipated) and you have to be very exacting with every step or the shortcuts will catch up to you.

Because it’s so labour intensive (I prepped these images a couple weeks ago), you have to really love the image you’re going to silkscreen. In this case, I got really sick of the layout of this card before I even started printing it.

Also, it’s an analog medium. So I kinda defeated the purpose by including a photoshop font in my card. I’d like to aim to keep every step analog next time. I’m going to strive for all hand-drawn fonts next time - as I think they better suit the medium (like this silkscreen guy Johnny linked to on Drawn earlier this week. All of his fonts are gorgeously hand-rendered).

As anticipated, my first batch of prints were a complete mess. I had to remove and wash the screen. Later I printed a series of cards with just the lineart on the back of the fudged pages - like this.

The illustration is something I did while living in Korea. It was for a story I wanted to do about my early days living in Toronto for one of the You Aint No Dancer anthologies. One of my earliest memories is stuffing my socks and underwear with packs of gum while my dad wasn’t looking. I never finished the comic - but I like the illustration, so I thought this might be a good place for it.

Finally, Miya knocked out two series of these gorgeous prints. We worked well together, I think. On more than one occasion, she prevented me from going postal with my squeegee - and I helped make sure her acetates were lining up ultra-cleanly. She’s doing prints of these as T-shirts! If you’re interested - let her know on her blog.