New Techniques

I decided to do a new print last night on paper rather than on fabric. I had tried it previously and the prints didn't turn out how I wanted, although I was still happy with the results after working over them with ink and fineliner.

The problem with printing onto paper is my screens are designed for fabric, which means more ink comes out of them as the fabric is more absorbent than paper. Because of this, when you print onto paper the excess ink has nowhere to go but sideways, making blotchy prints that leak. Sometimes the leaking is good and I find it is errors like this which make things more exciting, but sometimes you just want perfect prints with no side effects.

To overcome this I decided to put a layer of thin fabric between the screen and the paper as I had discovered some lovely prints on newspaper when printing onto fabric and thought it was a waste. I had some thin muslin type fabric and decided to use this.

This is my set up shot. I have the stencil, squeegee, knife, ink (Permaset black ink) and the screen. My table is just a board on a filing cabinet, nothing too fancy and not much room.

Once I did my first print I realised I could use the inked up fabric for another print. I placed it on a clean sheet of paper and put more paper on top, then used the bamboo baton to rub the paper quite hard. The ink comes off onto both sheets of paper so there is another two prints that can be gained from the printing process.

This is the part where I peel the top layer of fabric off. It can stick a bit to the paper, so it good to do it slowly so it comes off evenly.

Here is a close up shot of another print I did today, you can see the texture created from the fabric, and it has a lovely raised surface. The Tea and Treats print is available on my etsy shop. It is not one of the originals, but an artwork I worked over with fineliner, scanned and digitally coloured in. It has more detail than the original and the teacup is blue. The artwork I did today is of a man and you can see some more of the process from today at my Flickr account.