Screen Printing, a Curiosity-Inspiring Sector of Graphic Design.

Now, I know what the title may seem like. bit pretentious and wordy, but in my defence, I feel like this has an awful lot of potential to be something that I could sink my teeth into. I won't spoil anything too much right now, since I need to get along with actually showing you what I have done and how to do it.

But before this, I feel like I should explain a couple of words I will be using. This is because some of these words I haven't heard of before so I feel like it would be nice to share. With this, I also want to talk about them because it then will show I understand these terms and thus hopefully show that I am a smarty pants. Anyways, let's get into some.

Definition of Silk Screen, Made in Photoshop

By far the most essential thing about silk screening is, well, the silk screen. Now, I know the name of the silk screen might make you think that these are made from silk, and to a degree that is still true, but lower days we don't use silk and instead use other fabrics. They are usually a mesh piece of cloth on a frame made out of either wood or metal, sized to a standard of paper like A4 or A3.

Now, you cannot do silk screening without a sort of product, and that product you would be using is ink. We know what ink is though, but this is a different type. We specifically used Acrylic Speedball Ink. Now usually, you would get something called a bonder and a pigment and mix them to make an ink that's good for screen printing. Speedball is a brand of premixed ink that's used for paper. You can also get a different version for fabric instead, but for now, we are going to be using the acrylic version.

You might have noticed that in this picture here we have two different silk screens, one with a pattern and one without. These are called blank screens and exposed screens. To explain what a blank screen is, we need to explain what an exposed screen is. Exposed screens are when you use UV light and emulsion to beam an image upon a screen. Now, when you apply ink and swipe it using a squeegee (I will get to that later) you get the same pattern on the exposed screen.

Now, for us to make patterns on our pieces of paper, we used blank screens rather than exposed screens. Now, from what I've talked about here, you might be wondering something along the lines of "how did we make patterns without an exposed screen?" and we used paper stencils. Paper stencils are what they say on the tin, cut-out pieces of paper that obscure certain places on a plain, so when you use the silkscreen on it, it doesn't affect the parts underneath the paper stencils. I should also highlight that we didn't use any normal paper, we used a type of paper called Newsprint due to its weight and how it sticks to the silk screen when said silk screen is used, which means we get little to no ink spillage over the stencils.

Definition of Squeegee, Made in Photoshop

So, I have talked about this tool beforehand and I promised I would touch on it, so here we are. As you can see here, squeegees are usually comprised of some sort of handle and a piece of rubber that's used as a blade. These are quite important for the process because you have to drizzle your speedball ink over the screen, and for it to go through the said screen you need a utensil to both push the into down onto the paper along with spreading out said ink across the screen, which is the job of the squeegee. A fun little tip for you if you would like to do this at home, make sure when scraping the squeegee you have it on a 45-degree angle. This gives you the most pressure onto the blade of the squeegee, meaning you will have a more even spread across your final product.

So, you might be wondering what we do with our screens once we've used them. and we have two different processes for blank screens and exposed screens. Let's first talk about the process of blank screens. This is quite simple, we use a pressure washer to blast all the ink off of the stencils. If you don't know what a pressure washer is I can tell that you don't do much garden maintenance. But if you insist, a pressure washer is a machine that uses water and a pump to create a high-pressured stream to give anything it touches a deep and throughout clean. When done with this, we put said cleaned silk screen into a heated cabinet. This dries the silk screens quicker compared to leaving it in sunlight and is not necessarily for the process, but a simple nice-to-have that the shop we used has.

Now, if we were cleaning an exposed screen, that's a different story. We would first use the pressure washer as normal since there's still ink on there, but then we use a mixture of polyvinyl acetate and polyvinyl alcohol. When sprayed upon the exposed screen, this breaks down the UV exposed layer which turns it back into a regular blank screen. After this, we wash it again to make sure none of the exposed UV goop is on there and leave it in the heated cabinet until all is dry.

Now that I have explained the different terms, what they mean and roughly how the process goes, I think it's time to talk about how I did this.

Part One, Design and Cutting out

So I first looked for inspiration. And my inspiration was, once again, and I should probably look for something else rather than these, but their album covers. Okay, I am so sorry for continuing to go for them because they just look SO good, I promise you next time I will use the inspiration of their very limited edition merch or something on their Instagram, but anyways.

To be more specific, I used the inspiration from their Is It You? album title, since for me the font and the survey question mark really remind me of their music, especially on this album. I did have to take some artistic liberty with the O though because I didn't want to mess around with having to bring around a part just to make the title, so I made two thin semi-circle-looking lines. I should also say that this is a paper stencil and used a scalpel. newsprint and a cutting mat just so I didn't screw up the surface underneath.

I also made some extra parts as well, which can be seen in the top right. The inspiration for these little parts is from the question mark from the Is It You? title. Since it was so wobbly compared to the rest of the letters, I thought it would be quite cool to add some extra just to give it some sort of stylistic consistency.

For what I have done here, this part of the process was pretty good for a first try. the letters look like what they are supposed to and I like my idea of adding other shapes that aren't in the original design. But, if I were to redo this I would spend more time making the letters more in proportion with the reference, along with possibly making more complicated shapes as accents or even using more of the cover as inspiration for other stencils I could have made to make a more visually complex result.

Step Two, Setting Up the Prints

Okay, I will be honest, the graphic before this I am really proud of. I mean look at the shadow that's left on the Is It You? from the scalpel being on top of it! with this, the idea of using polaroid mockups to add extra images that would've looked unusual if I tried to edit them into the shot normally is a really clever idea of mine.

So as the title of the image reads, this is the set-up part of printing. Now I did only capture the process of printing the test prints, but to be honest, you're not missing much when it comes to the second design, it was basically the same but I had to use e different silk screen for the other colour (is that spoilers? I don't think it matters, this ain't a marvel movie, this is a blog post made by a 17-year-old, and if you care that much I would recommend finding better hobbies).

So, the process. The first thing I did was make my own green. This is because they didn't have any greens that I liked. So I mixed together blue and yellow acrylic speedball ink and got the result as seen in the polaroid picture. I will admit, I'm not the happiest with the green made there but I will touch on that when I am done rambling about this image.

After this, I placed the A3 piece of newsprint along with placing on top of my silk screen, placing the stencils down to only colour everything around them, and then poured the ink I made onto one of the shorter sides of the screen. Keep in mind that the mesh part should always be touching the paper you are wanting to print on, because if not then you will not get the result you would like, to say the least.

I didn't take a picture of this because I was too busy actually doing the process but when the silk screen as down and the ink was there amongst other factors, I got the squeegee and asked a staff member to hold down the silkscreen so I could get an even spread and dragged along the rubber blade onto the silk screen keeping a 45-degree angle on said blade for three swipes, left right left.

This part of the process wasn't exactly the most interesting part to reflect upon, mainly because there wasn't anything very creative about this because I was simply printing. But I could still reflect on it. I thought the idea of making a different colour rather than using the ones on offer was clever enough, along with my arrangement of stencils was also visually interesting.

This isn't all sunshine and sparkles though. One thing I would have changed is making more designs than the two I made since they look quite similar. With this, I wish I also made my own yellow rather than using the one pre-made, since I don't think it looks that good with the green I made, which we shall see right when I finish this sentence.

Part Three, The Final Products.

Okay first thing, I forgot about giving this all a white border. I can only apologise, and I would fix it but that is a problem I can deal with at a later date. I should also say that those little mind shrine logos on the last graphic weren't actually there, I just felt the shot was empty so I thought it would be nice to fill it up with some cool pictures.

Now, I would usually do a full in-depth analysis of all four of these, but I don't think that's necessary, since anything else but Attempt 1 Print 2 Design 2 tested and tried things to see what would happen. With this though I'm not even happy with the end result, which I shall touch on. Also, see what I mean when I said I should've made my own yellow

So, let's touch on Attempt 1 Design 1. From the title alone you can tell this is my very first, and I think it went okay. The spread is good enough for a first shot and the stencil came out really clean. Something I don't like about it though is since I didn't mix it properly, you can see I still had some yellow in the ink, which left this horrible line on the side. With this, the spread was okay but not nearly as good as our next one, Attempt 2 Design 1. I would fix these by probably waiting for it to dry and painting over it with the same paint, making sure the layer I paint is very thin. I don't know if it will work well but this is why we experiment. We live and we learn.

Now, Attempt 2 Design 1 is a whole lot better. We can first see that the spread of the ink is so much better. This is because I actually had somebody else to hold down the silk screen since I was a little scared to ask anybody the first time, but I couldn't take making a terrible graphic once again. Another thing I like about this is the unusual way the light is bouncing off of this, which looks like wobbly round lines and for me, that really goes with the feeling of Mind Shrine surprisingly. Now, the only thing I am not happy with is how I accidentally touched the underside of the stencil in between attempt 1 and attempt 2 which left the ink splodge on the Y, along with the overall design that could have been better, but this is addressed in Design 2, which is also the final product in my eyes. For now, though, I could probably do better. Okay, anyways final thing.

Final Product, Edited in Photoshop

See I didn't forget to make the white border! I think this is the best thing I made here, and I have some extra explaining for this piece since I kinda forgot to take photos of what I did, along with not being bothered to make another graphic to show so I will just type it out.

So, if you remember in Part 2's graphic you could see the positive of the is it you stencil, what I did was cut around it with a wavy pattern to get what we have here. After this, I got a higher quality piece of paper, I couldn't tell you what paper it was all I know is that it felt better to touch than the other newsprints we were printing on.

So, I placed the positive AND the negative down onto the piece of paper, so I could have a white space between the yellow and the green. I also placed down the weird shapes that I made from the inspiration of the wobbly question mark. Okay, so I then placed the silkscreen, poured the yellow ink onto the side, asked somebody to hold said silkscreen down flat and went over it with the squeegee.

I got only the yellow layer, which can be seen as Attempt 1 Print 1 Design 2. I would critique that but that's like giving a full-page essay on each stroke of a paintbrush on a painted picture, don't judge until the piece is done. I then got a new silkscreen and then removed the letter stencils so it would colour the letters, along with placing the stencil that was made by removing the Is It You? stencil (this is getting confusing, I am sorry) so it would affect the yellow. As we can see that didn't work fully but I will get to that.

And so, after not asking anybody to push down the silkscreen, I poured the ink on and used the squeegee once more to get the result we have here. Now that I have finished talking about how I did this (I am also now remembering that I didn't have to go this in-depth with the explanation of what I did, but I guess it's a little too late now since it's literally the end and I am going to be doing the final reflection, but anyways)

What do I think of this product I have made here? I think it's pretty good. There are things that could make it a lot better but apart from that, this is okay.

Was it successful? I think so because although right now I would say that it doesn't look good, I did make what I intended to create, so I guess it was successful, it's just now that I have had more time to look at it, and I begin to hate it.

What would I do differently? Okay, so the first thing I would do is change the yellow with a more sunflower yellow, along with swapping the green and yellow places across the entire piece besides the letters. I would also have ahs somebody help me push the silk screen down whilst I was doing the green print.

How could I develop this further? I could by first using multiple colours on a single silk screen. So half of the strip at the end of the shorter side of the screen is pink, whilst the other is green. Or, I could take some inspiration from Lino Printing and add brush splatter for a more interesting look. I would also experiment with using fabric rather than just acrylic since I like the idea of making graphics for clothing.

Is this something I would revisit in the future? Perhaps. I've seen what Andy Warhol has done with screen printing, and that has inspired me to try and look into this further when I am not busy learning other ways to make graphics.