A few months ago, Mary came up with a very cool idea for a screenprinting project. Since then, she's been assembling everything she needs to make it work. We finally got all the pieces arranged and spent a lot of our Sunday working on this. (Turns out, screenprinting is quite involved!)
Here's a rough photo journey of the day.
With the Speedball screenprinting kit, we taped the edges and prepared for work.
The green sheen is a "photo-emulsion" chemical. Essentially it's like a photo developer chemical.
The darkroom assembled (we replaced the heat lamp with a red bulb) the photo emulsion stuff dries out. Then we put it under a special 250w bulb and bake the whole thing for 10 minutes.
We put a transparency over the photo stuff–whatever was covered would bake, and what was under cover of the black on the transparency would wash off. So below you can see the screen after we've created our pattern.
Here we've inked up the screen with some test paper underneath.
And voila! The final product. Printed shapes on paper.
Obviously, this is just a test run for the equipment and our own knowledge. The photo journey makes it look easy, but in truth, there were other screens that failed miserably and lots of reading books and watching tutorials on Youtube.
Still! A quite successful day of screenprinting. We've unpacked the darkroom and converted it back to a bathroom. Hopefully next time we'll be able to try an actual piece in the project, where we'll be getting into two and three-colors, and eventually t-shirts!