I've been working on a poster for a local radio station here, they are having "The Laughing Prairie Dog Music Festival" at the beginning of December. I'm finishing up the line drawing and adding color later; I am probably going to post a process blog of how I silk screen, if I remember to take pictures :D Anyways, I had a nugget of an idea a while ago as some of you may have remembered that doodle, and it grew into this:


Colors to follow later! YAY!



Update:



THE PROCESS

First, you have to coat the screens with a light sensitive emulsion. It's a green goop liquid that you put in a scoop coater which looks sort of like a metal trough. A not so great shot of me coating a screen:


After that, I stack the screens and hide them away in my canning closet in my basement, but any dark place will do. I don't have a drying rack big enough for these guys so I put peices of wood in between the aluminum part to get air in between.


Then I print out the transparencies which will be taped to the screen during exposure. I have to splice mine together since I have only 18 x 13 sheets but the poster is 18 x 24. Here they are all stacked up:


I then tape the transparency to a dried screen and lay it on the floor. I have a piece of foam underneath the screen that's covered with black felt. The felt keeps light from bouncing around behind the image and the foam makes sure that the transparency is properly smushed against the screen when I put the glass on top. I've suspended a light from the ceiling so it's just the right distance to expose the emulsion. I use a 750 watt halogen lamp which has enough UV light in it to do the trick.


Then you hose out the screen. All the stuff hidden by the dark part on the transparency is still soft and it comes right out. I've luckily got a shower in my basement but otherwise you'd use a washout booth:




I'll start actually printing with this stuff tomorrow and I'll have more to show you then :D

MORE:

So, I use the transparencies to line up all the screens. I line it up with the color I just printed then lay the screen on top of that, and look through to see how everything lines up. I use registration marks and eyeyball it til it lines up. As you can kind of see in the photo, I use 3 paper tabs, 2 on one side and one on the other. This is how I line up the sheet of paper in the exact same place every time. I didn't take pics of the first two color cuz I'm lazy, but here you can see the last 2.


After lining it up, I screw the screen to the table using my handy dandy jiffy clamps. This allows me to move it up and down and keeps it in place. I then put ink on the screen and "flood" it, that is cover up the entire stencil. I have to do this every 4th or fifth pull of the squeegee in order to keep the stencil from drying out. As you can also see I have some grodi old clothes I wear just for this, it's a messy process :D







There's a step in between here - I take off the posters and let them dry in between colors and I have to line up the next color but we'll skip that since I just showed you.





TaDa!