My sister-in-law gave me a silkscreening kit that included this generously sized silkscreen frame. Since I don’t usually do art this large, I decided to use the screen for four different shots so that I could try my hand at a multi colored silk screen.

I started by looking for something inspirational. Since I have a thing for birds, I used an old Audobon print as reference. I wanted something colorful and simple, that would make up use of white space. I preferred to do something in the colors of blue, brown, red, and black (which are the colors of block printing ink I own) but couldn’t think of anything. I settled on this tanager, and decided that I would use acrylic paint mixed with the gel retarder I bought for silkscreens.

Doing the four different colors wasn’t very hard. I sketched it out and just moved the silk screen over my sketch to sketch out the different colored layers. I used the drawing fluid, which serves as a mask for the red ink mask, a two step process that they describe in the kit as a simpler alternative to photo emulsion. They also say you can just paint the red ink mask/resist directly on the silk and skip the blue drawing fluid entirely. I think this might be a better idea. By painting on the red ink mask directly, I could get more control.

Mixing the acrylic paint with the retarder worked great. Not only could I create the exact shades I wanted, but the acrylic is waterproof when it dries. I use water clean up block printing ink when proofing my silkscreens (and for linoblocks) and one of its drawbacks is that it runs when damp. The gel retarder really slowed down the drying time (which is what you want it to do) so I had to wait overnight between color prints.

Now for the major drawback: since I was using different sizes of paper, and since each image was oriented imprecisely on the silkscreen, I had to line up the subsequent color proofs by hand. Sometimes, this made for “interpretive dance” style silkscreen prints.

This photo isn’t very good, sorry.  You can see how off the colors are. They remind me of sheets from the sixties and seventies, or cheap cartoons.

I think to make them lined up, I’d have to have paper that was all the same size, that fit into a frame. I’d also have to have a single image per silk screen. This is kind of a pain, because cleaning off the red stuff is the biggest hassle, and because it takes a few hours for each layer to dry. It took close to two weeks from conception to finish to make these cards.  Here’s one of the better ones.

I think in the future, I’ll stick more to single-color prints, maybe on colored paper, which I then collage.

Here’s the close up of the new crow image. This is the third crow design, fourth, if you count the one that didn’t turn out. As you can see, I painted back in some of the details with a brush, since not all the lines on the head and claws came out.

To set the ink, the directions say “use iron for 3-5 minutes per side at highest setting.” I learned the hard way that this burns the cloth. Instead, I used my little craft toaster over at about 250 degrees. I fold the tee shirts up and lay them in there with the design facing up. For the most part, this works brilliantly, but this shirt got a sleeve a little close to the heating element and scorched. I’ll live with it.

One of the consistent comments I’ve gotten from this is “you should sell these” or “have you considered selling these?” With the amount of work that goes into printing one of these shirts, I’d have to charge $50 a piece to earn minimum wage. I may make some for gifts or promotional giveaways, however.

So here’s the detail of the wings that I printed using the photo emulsion technique.

I took the silk screen and poured a bead of photo emulsion liquid on it, and used the squeegie to put an even layer on both sides, as it said to in the directions. Then, I put it in a dark cabinet to dry for a few hours.

Problem: the emulsion was too thick, and it beaded up, making thick dots all over the image.

Solution: clean it off and start over.

The second time, I did a slightly thinner layer of the photo emulsion and put it in the cabinet for a couple of hours, then tried again. Taking it out of the cabinet, I put in on my desk and laid the transparency with the design on top of it. I attached the light source the directions suggested (150 watt bulb in a pie pan shade, 12″ above the image) and let it sit there for the amount of time the directions suggested (45 minutes).

Problem: the transparency stuck to the emulsion, ripping when I took it off.

Solution: let it dry more next time.

Bigger Problem: ink would not go through silkscreen, even after rinsing it for ten minutes.

Solution: clean the silk and start over.

So I did it again. This time I spread the emulsion in a darkened room and handled it at night (after letting it dry all day in a dark cabinet). Using a new transparency, as before.

Problem: Ink would still not go through the screen.

Proposed solution: get fresher emulsion.

I went to the art store and talked to the guy there about my problem. He said the emulsion was probably not bad, since it was only a couple of months old and had been refrigerated, but that 45 minutes with that light source was excessive. He also suggested using double transparency, so that I had a cleaner image. I went home and prepped a new silk with another layer of photo emulsion. Then I printed out a double layer of transparency and tried 30 minutes of light instead of 45 minutes.

Problem: Didn’t have the detail I wanted. Some of the lines didn’t come through at all.

Solution: I hadn’t been using a piece of plexiglass to lay it flat, because the one I had didn’t quite fit. However, I did find a picture frame that had a piece of glass that fit nearly exactly, so I borrowed it.

Here’s the result. The detail on the tips of the wings is missing, and I can’t see all the feather veining, but after all the effort I put into this, I’ll take it.

I got this idea from a woman who had wings on the back of her tee shirt. It was one of those currently-popular Victoriana/skateboard style of designs. I don’t know what it’s called, but here are some examples. I’m sure you’ve seen stuff like this. My daughter calls it “steampunk rock design.” It’s a specific style, full of ornate floral-like designs, often with victoriana motifs such as keys or wings, and sometimes gothic elements, such as skulls or crosses or stabbed hearts.

If anyone knows what the name is for this type of art, let me know. I see it everywhere, on bags at Target and tee shirts at Hot Topic, and other mainstream chains as well.

Anyway, I wanted to do a silkscreen of wings to put on the back of my tee shirts wiht the crows on the front, but the drawing ink isn’t detailed enough, so I had to draw it on a piece of paper with a sharpie. Then I scanned it and printed it on a transparency, and used the transparency to make the photo-emulsion silkscreen. I had issues with it. I’ll discuss it in the other post.

Once I finished the silk screen, I wanted to do a proof print to see how it turned out. I use block printing ink for this, as I have a lot of it in different colors.  Since I didn’t want to do it for nothing, I printed the crows onto some blank notecards I’d bought at Michael’s at the huge sale I gorge myself at every Thanksgiving. Now I have a small set of printed notecards, and I also could figure out where the issues were with the silk screen.

For example, you may not be able to tell by looking at this photo, but the beak has a tiny dot at the end of it, and the claws seem to be truncated. On the tee shirts, I touched this up with a brush, but on the cards, I just left them.  The last time I did crow silkscreens, I had a problem with the image not showing up very well, but this time I just did an extra flood sweep with the squeegie to make sure that enough ink went through the screen.