Studio Practice: Stress and swearing

So my print experience was a rollercoaster of emotions.

Day 1: Thursday

Go to print to clean three screens and coat them. B-solve the screens and wait ten minutes before scrubbing down three times and it was still blocked in places. By the end print was closing and my screens were still wet and there was still emulsion at the edges.

Day 2: Friday

Come in to coat my screens. Can't find a paint trough the right size for my frames, decided bigger was better. I was wrong. It was thick in the middle, I tried to scrape some off to thin it. I put it in the drying cupboard and went to the studio. I went back to check my screen every hour for the rest of the day and it wasn't dry; at 4pm I realised its because the cupboard wasn't turned on.

Day 3: Monday

Exposed my screens and washed them. As I washed them the emulsion, which was thick and a bit tacky, just started to fall off. I decided to cut my losses, ditch the screens and get new ones. Found three completely clean screens to use, coated without issue and made sure the drying cupboard was on. Things were looking good.

came down later and exposed, one of the screens was slightly tacky and the positive stuck to the screen. When I pulled it off it ripped little bits of emulsion off all over the screen. It wasn't too bad so I washed them but the tacky one I didn't use the sponge in case I loosened anything.

Day 4: Tuesday

Went to print and mixed my colours. I decided to go with yellow and a purple; like aubergine but slightly more pink. I picked them because I decided that I shouldn't have just picked greens for the turtle and red for the brains because it was too obvious and traditional. Pratchett did everything n his own way and it made him stand out so I figured why not have the prints stand out too. Purple and yellow are opposite sides of the colour wheel so they contrast yet compliment each other.

The yellow and purple layer went without an issue and I was getting confident. Then I Put my black screen on; I set up, put my ink out, clamped down my frame, flooded the screen, pulled the ink through for the acetate print, the squeegee couldn't reach the bottom of the print because the clamps stuck out and blocked it. then to top it off I put the squeegee at the back and it fell into all the ink.

I undd it all and put the screen the other way around. The ink bled a lot and the squeegee fell in the ink again. So at that point I gave up for the day.

Day 5: Wednesday

Black layer time. I feel ready. Then it bleeds, on all of my paper layer and some of the ink at the edge doesn't even go through. I did loads of newspaper prints to try and sort t because I was down to my two water colour paper prints. I finally got it to an acceptable stage on the newsprint and moved on to the paper confidently. It bled. On both.

Things I learned in print:

Always use a trough that's smaller than your screen.

Use screens that are the next A size up from the positives so that there's room for the squeegee.

Use thick lines on positives, only fat fine liners or something bigger.

If you want to do hand drawn do them all on one page and match them up.

Put only a THIN layer of emulsion on the screen.

When making ink its 2 spoons of ink to 100g of medium but in my experience its kind of better to have it slightly thicker.

Make as many test prints as the ink allows so that there's more room for mistakes.

Some of the ink was just missing and on some of the worse ones the words were so blurred with bleed they were unreadable.

I found a cheating solution to the missing ink. I don't have time to print again so short cuts had to be taken.

Since so many of my prints went wrong I decided to just go through each set and pick out the best one of each. Since some of the prints were messy on both of my good paper ones and I wanted consistency I chose to only use the cartridge prints. Except for Death's hand, which I thought looked more effective in the watercolour stock.

I cut them out, originally I was going to have a border of white around them but since there was bleed which would break the solid line of contrast I decided it would be better just cut without.

I chose the watercolour paper because it was thick stock and Would hold its shape which I needed for the mobile to work. But since I had to choose cartridge prints I needed something to make them more sturdy.