So here is part 2 of your screen printing master class! Not exactly a highly professional operation, but you will get the idea with a bit of luck.......
So,first of all you need to find some fabric and give it a bit of an iron - at college we have a proper print table which has a neoprene surface which is then coated in something called gum arabic - this is a type of glue which when you iron your fabric down on to it, becomes sticky and keeps the fabric attached to the table so that it doesn't "pick up" when you start to print. At home I have a board with blanket stretched over it onto which I can pin my fabric so as to keep it in place.
Below are the other important tools of the trade - hand towel to clear up the mess (of which I make plenty), jars of ink - this is made from a concentrate and a binder, think of the concentrate as being the cordial and the binder being the water if you like! A spoon (to spoon out the ink) and the grubby looking objects under the spoon are called squeedges and these are what you use to push the ink through your screen and onto the fabric as you will see below.....
Because I have put lots of images on one screen and not left much space around them, I am isolating the image I want to print with masking tape, this helps me to not only focus on what I am printing, but will also help to prevent me from printing other images from my screen by providing something of a barrier.
I then carefully spoon some of the ink above the image I intend to print on top of the masking tape, as I said above, this will prevent the ink from seeping through the screen in areas I don't want it to - the text in this instance.
A bad picture, sorry, but then, carefully and at a 45 degree angle and relatively firmly, I drag the ink across the image, where the fabric may be seen through the image, the ink will be printed....
And there you have it - your image all beautifully printed!
In order to prevent the residue ink drying and therefore blocking your screen you must use a damp sponge to clean it up on both sides and then give it a quick dry with some hand towel - you can use a hair dryer to speed the drying process up, but be warned the silk screen can melt if it becomes too hot!
What I love to do is to build up a collage effect by over printing and over printing, using lots of different images and colours until I get a finished "picture", this really is a case of trial and error as mostly the colours are transparent, so for example, if you print a yellow over a red, you will make orange, also some of my inks are mixed with an opaque binder so that I can print light colours onto darker grounds, and when you print over these your colours will change too, and the opaque colour will always show through - so you never quite know what sort of effect you might get.....
It is also a really good idea to keep a hair dryer at hand to dry each print as you go, this will prevent smudging and bleeding, keeping things nice and crisp and clean.
Here are two finished pieces from the same afternoon.
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