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.

This is kind of a weird picture, because it’s a selection of the tee shirts that I silkscreened my crow onto. I’ll post pictures of the crow later, a close up and some cards that I did.

This is actually a new image, not the same crow that I did earlier. I had done the earlier silk screen, but wanted to use the silkscreen for another project, so I washed off all the resist. Sadly, the screen turned out to not be large enough for the other project, so I cleaned it for naught. I ended up doing another silkscreen on that silk, which I’ll talk about in another post.

Fortunately, my dad had a hand-made silkscreen frame he’d made for printing decals for his model airplanes. His silk had resist on it that was probably ten years old, so I had to buy a length of new silkscreen silk, which was fine by me. New silk is better than used silk, because sometimes not all the resist comes off.

To make this crow design, I traced a proof of the crow I’d silkscreened earlier. I traced it twice, one facing right and one facing left, and then painted over both of them with drawing ink. The resist overlapped more than I wanted, and one of the birds got ruined, but this one was still mostly usable. After I was done, I printed crows on everything that didn’t have a crow on it, including some new shirts I got on sale at Target. I also printed in red ink on my dark tee shirts, because the black didn’t show up. It took the better part of two weeks to silkscreen everything, because I did both sides. This isn’t even all of the shirts, because some of them were in the laundry.

I didn’t feel much like throwing this class session, so I decided to try some alternative pottery ideas. This is one of them. My friend had some plastic embossing strips for ceramic artists, and she used them to make a cool mug. I made this mug, which didn’t turn out quite as cool because there was some separation at the bottom and now it won’t hold water.  So now it’s a pen holder.

I made a new silkscreen of a nearly identical crow this week.  Today I silkscreened them on to my remaining tee shirts. I think I have a lot of tee shirts.  After this, I was supposed to iron them for 3-5 minutes on each side to set the ink.  This ended up kind of scorching the fabric.  Instead, I put them in the craft oven at about 275 for ten minutes. Still smelled a little scorched (like a high-heat dryer) but I hope it set the ink.

After I finished silkscreening my tee shirts, I wanted to see if I could use blockprinting ink on the silkscreen.

I had to wash the silkscreening ink off, and it specifically said that you mustn’t have any ink on the silk or you would ruin it, so I scrubbed fiercely.  I didn’t realize that the ink stained, and that part wouldn’t come off, so I ended up scrubbing some of the resist off. There were pinholes in it after I washed it. I also ended up washing loose the adhesive on the masking tape, so I had to use a paper as a block for the top of the card.

I did manage to answer the question that Google couldn’t answer for me, namely, “Can you use blockprinting ink on a silk screen?”  In a word: yes.  However, my first few prints had too much ink, and the images became unpleasantly smeared and dotted on the left side of the image.  These later ones are fine for cards, I think. They have an interesting fabric texture on them, and I like the inconsistency.

I often wear tee shirts, and almost all of my shirts have no logo or design on them at all.  Usually, that’s the way I like it.  However, I’ve been toying with the idea of having a design on my shirts.  A crow, naturally, since I like them so much.

I bought a silkscreening kit at Michael’s that came with a stencil and some fabric ink.  I didn’t want anything simple enough to be put on with a stencil, so I also bought the drawing and resist kit.  I thought about doing the photo emulsion kit, but this was cheaper. Besides, I wanted to do my own design, and I figured that drawing it directly on the silk would eliminate at least one step.

For those of you trying this at home, let me assure you that the drawing medium is not the easiest to work with.  It doesn’t want to get nearly as fine as I wanted it.  You have to brush it on, so fine lines are out of the question.  Still, I was able to paint this little crow onto the silk.  After you paint it on and let it dry, you squeegee the resist over the surface. I didn’t want to use an entire bottle of resist, so I blocked out some of the screen with masking tape.

After the resist dries, you run it under water until the drawing ink washes out.  At this point, it’s pretty much ready to go.  By applying a single pass with the ink, I was able to make pretty good prints onto my tee shirts.  I did a run of eight shirts, and then the ink started to get too viscous.

One problem I had was that the line at the top of the beak got covered over with resist, and therefore didn’t show up when I did the print.  Also, the later prints looked faded near the tail.  I used a paintbrush to touch up these areas. They have a handmade look, which I do not consider a defect here.

The directions say that you must heat set the image for 3-5 minutes on each side with an iron. I did that, but found that the cloth I used over it got scorched.  We’ll see how well it washes.