Screen Printing Experiments - 02.05.23
I managed to get a set of screens prepped and ready to screen print on 28.04.23 as I needed to experiment with them. On Friday when the screens were prepped, I managed to get the base color of cyan, whilst today I managed to get the rest of the colors done for that day. The slideshow below shows the process of the screenprint from the base color of cyan to the last color of the print.
There were some problems along the way though. The first one was some of the screens had imperfections from where other students used the screens and had dried-up ink on the screens that would leave a white mark due to the ink not being able to penetrate it. The other problem was trying to line up screens using the registration marks, this was fine to use but an easier way was to use the printing bed that they have on hand in the textiles room. Another issue that was found during the screen printing process was that the black and white bitmapped image used were too high-density for the screen printing process. Due to me using the A2-sized screen prints, the half-tone dots were too close together and would mean that the density of these dots was too high for each screen and thus would block out most of the color that was printed underneath.
To fix this problem, I would need to either use screen printing ink that would be able to colour the white paper underneath to create the exact colours as any ink overlapping would produce colours close to the original photo, with half-tone dots being able to create the gradients for colours that have specific tones and hues needed for the final piece. The other technique that I can do is to decrease the line per inch of dots to block out more of the paper, whilst still being able to see what the poster is about. But this has trade backs as this would then make the poster too half toned and you would not be able to see what the poster was about.
I think that the best option is to go for ink which would enable me to create the colors by adding them together. Another idea that I had was to ask a local screenprinting business to ask about the specific way to print the CMYK posters. Another thing that I can do is to print out the posters using inkjet printer, that way I could have the look of screen printed poster and just call it a day. But I will try and push myself to create these posters using screen print due to having a much more interesting look compared to printing them from a printer. It also adds uniqueness to it as any imperfections adds to the quality of the poster.
Overall, there will be many things that need to be thought of before the final posters are ready to be created.