21/3/2011 Smooth and Silky Printing.

Been a while since my last post but we have come on leaps and bounds and it's time to blog it all and note it down. So after playing around with etching i'm pretty confident with the technique now. I need to do a few more etchings relating to the brief because i have a very good feeling that etching will be involved within the final piece. 


Back to the studio to play. Today i decided to try a different print technique and hit screen printing. I have never done it before even though i have always wanted to. I used to think it was really confusing and tricky to learn - turns out i was wrong. Caroline showed us how everything works and what to do, i honestly cant believe i'm just getting into screen printing because i have seriously missed out, but hopefully this can be the start of something big. 


Once i understood how everything works, i sat down to decide on an image and what to print to play around with. This was fairly tricky as i was thinking too much into what and how i wanted it to look, so i needed a small push. A helpful hand from Caroline suggested that we could actually scan in one of my metal plates which had been etched into. From my previous prints i hadn't washed the plate so the ink was still visible and dry, it looked pretty cool and an added bonus was the dirty marks which we decided not to wash off as this will the scan an interesting element. 


I played around with sections and different shades, shadows, colours and contrasts for a while on photoshop, just messing about with my scan. The original scan came out surprisingly well. The colours are so strong and the marks on top of the etching and inked up areas add to the image, they could be clouds, a storm or waves, they just add some energy to the print. 

I was pretty happy with some of the photoshopping i had done to my image and i was slowly getting towards the right print to use for my screen printing. At first i was playing around with just sections of the plate, sadly i don't have these because Graham logged off the computer without saving them but i do have the original experiments printed out in my research folder. Once i was happy i decided to make a large sequence of the plate. Obviously the plate is too long for one A3 piece of paper so i needed to chop it into three parts on photoshop and print them separately. Below are my final images saved as bitmaps.

My screen prints are now ready to go and i will finishing my printing and experimentation next time i get into the studio. Whilst I was in the studio today i came up with a new idea which i need to play around with - I'm thinking of using screen printing as a background, like landscapes or something and then using etching over the top. I have a good feeling that this will work and i can play around with my etchings that i have already done but i will do some fresh ones so that i can get closer to a final piece and develop my work. Slowly getting there.