The aim of this task was to create a 2 colour separation A4 screen print, taking into consideration all we had learnt in our studio sessions and lectures about colour, as well as the compositional rules regarding depth, line of sight, frame, arrangement and viewpoint. The theme of our screen print was "Do something good" and this could be approached/interpreted in a variety of ways, for example:
Doing something good - something we enjoy
Do something good - something good for the planet, humanity, ourselves or for someone else etc.
Initial Ideas/Inspiration
Instantly I was drawn to the idea of "do something good" for the world. It would have been really easy to choose something obvious that I like doing, so instead I wanted to challenge myself and focus on a theme I haven't created much artwork for in the past. I have been looking into the environmental impacts of technology in our COP sessions recently along with deforestation as a result, and I knew I wanted to create something natural, simple and surrounding the theme of helping/saving the environment as an outcome for this project. If the image was successful, I was wanting to use it within my COP sessions as a visual aid for my Petcha Kutcha presentation.
As I had been looking into deforestation for my COP project, I decided a good theme for "do something good" could be re-forestation and came up with the idea of planting seeds. I had experienced the efforts of volunteers deep within the Borneo rainforest when I went travelling in Indonesia last year, and it was humbling to see how much the natives cared about their surrounding and cared about the life of one of the oldest rainforests on our plant.
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| Initial hand planting seeds sketch |
Process and development of screen print positives
I began by scanning in my initial line drawing of my composition and tracing it using the pen tool in Illustrator. I had been using illustrator a lot for part of our Visual Communication brief and felt confident enough to use it when creating my screen print positives for this task.
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| Traced outline of line drawing in illustrator. Tone added to create depth and detail |
After I had the basic idea of composition within my image, I was able to separate my colour values in to 2 different images, one for each colour in the separation. I focused on one colour for the main outlines of the image and the second colour for the tones/shadows/details within the image.
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| Separating the elements within the image |
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| Choosing patterns to separate tone and detail using illustrator swatches |
After I had all the images separated between 2 different documents, I was able to use file>place to put both images back into the same document and checked that they worked together and that everything was in place. Once both images were in the correct place, I was able to add registration marks fin the corners of each document to help line up my images when it came to print.
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| Checking that both positves were in the correct place when put together for screen printing |
Final screenprint positives:
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| Kodatrace image 1- Light Green |
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| Kodatrace image 2 - Dark Green |
Printing process
Friday 13th March
My first screen print session was on Friday the 13th and without sounding too superstitious - this definitely set the tone for the nightmare day.
The process in which our screen print sessions were planned was that we were to print in pairs where we both were to have the same base colour and an individual top colour to be printed afterwards. Our images were to be split and exposed onto the screens accordingly so that our first base colour images were exposed onto the same screen so that we could print our first colour together, then tape up/mask and separate our second screen and print our second individual top colours side by side but.
For this Friday session, I was the only one in the whole group who decided to print on Kodatrace. After being told that this was the desired paper to print my screen print positives onto, I thought I was doing myself a favour, but because no one else had done this, including my partner Amy..this caused a lot of problems.
First of all, my positives needed a separate amount of exposure time onto my screen than everyone else. Printer paper positives needed 170 seconds exposure onto the screen whereas my kodatrace positives only needed 17 seconds. This meant that i could not pair up with my partner because both our positives needed different exposure times, so instead we did ours individually, with both of our positives being exposed onto the same screen.
After being told I had to wait until last for my screen to be exposed because it took the least amount of time and after washing my screen after the exposure, it became really obvious that my screen had not had enough exposure time. Rinsing the emulsion off, a lot of my details did not appear very clear and began to worry that the paint would not come through the screen very clear when it came to print.
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| Mixing paints. 100g medium + 2 tbsp colour |
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| Colour choice - both greens to keep it natural and in keeping with the subject matter. Pink and dark green were Amy's colour choice for her print. |
After mixing up our paints and waiting for our screens to dry from washing, Amy and I taped up our screens and took it in turns to print our first colour - our lighter colour. As expected no colour came out in any of my prints what-so-ever. In fact it was worse than I had expected but I tried to stay positive and hoped that my top darker screen print would lift the image and add at least some of the detail in my positives.
When it came to printing my second and final top colour, I made sure i applied a lot of pressure when screen printing in the hope i could force some of the paint through and make the details of my image clearer. unfortunately this still didn't work, and the resulting image was pretty much non-existent:
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| First screen print attempt |
After spending 9 hours in the print room with very little to show for my efforts, I was really upset and disheartened. Luckily our technician was extremely apologetic and told me that I could return the following Wednesday to print with a few other members of my class who had not managed to print successfully either. He also mentioned it would be best to photocopy my kodatrace images, which will help flatten and blacken the image and details and also put them onto printer paper for a longer and more successful exposure onto my screen next time.
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Wednesday 18th March
My second attempt at printing was a lot more successful. I made sure that the screen print positives were printed on thin printer paper instead of kodatrace, and this meant that my images had a full 170second exposure on to my screen, bringing out a lot more of the detail within the hands and tonal patterns.
With this in mind I decided to use a bright pink for the main hand outlines and keep the lighter green for the tones and seed colour. The vibrance of the individual colours and how they work together should make the final print stand out and help all the final detail to be as clear and as visible as possible. I was also hoping that where I had planned for both of the colours to overlap - a third, darker colour will be created, adding interest and depth to the final image and an idea of the soil where the seeds are being planted.
Because my images had now been printed on the same media as everyone else, I was able to pair up with Joe this time, which helped us print a lot faster. Once we had finished printing our base colour, we didn't have to wait for our screen to dry before printing our next colour (as we would have done if we had both had our own 2 separation positives exposed onto the same screen). We could just use our second screen already dry from the wash earlier on.
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| Loading up the screen print bed with our screen |
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| Pink screen detail - tape to cover imperfections |
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| Light green screen detail |
Final Image
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| Pink detail |
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| Final full 2 colour separation screen print |
Despite struggling throughout the whole screen printing process, I am really pleased with the outcome of my image. This is the first time I have ever created screen print positives digitally and I really like the professional clean look of the detail I was able to achieve (where successful).
Working in pairs for this task (during my second attempt at printing) really enabled me to learn a lot more about the process and have more direction, time and choice than I had experienced in our previous group hotdog book task.
I really tried hard to include a lot of the compositional elements we have learnt throughout this module in my final composition, and although this ins't as clear and as evident as I would have liked, I really like the composition within my image and feel it has a lot of strengths in its layout and boldness thanks to the colour choice.
Along with its strengths, I am afraid that the weaknesses outweigh these in my final outcome. Working in pairs during my second attempt at printing meant that there was a lot of waiting around for images to be lined up with the screens using our registration marks. Although me and my partner wanted out images to be lined up perfectly, this meant that the paint on our screens began to dry and a lot of the detail in my images suffered because of this. Not one of my prints were successful in the end as I had no clean lines when printing my top second colour of paint and I really feel this let my final image down.
I was so close to asking for a third printing session to get my image perfect, but I knew I had ran out of time and chances for getting this right. If I could have another chance at this task, I would maybe think about not choosing such intricate detail within the image and maybe try to do it by hand instead of digitally. I would like to print on my own to reduce the chance of my medium drying out on my screen and also like to look at a more dynamic and striking composition, taking up more of the frame and not leaving so much blank space.
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