I Think I nEEd to Dip MySelf in Paint
I’ve had two weeks of administration overload trying to sort
out tax and delivery problems and blah blah blah. I might need to dip myself in paint to feel completely
normal again, just need to get back to the creating side of the business…mmm
happy.
Screen printing takes up a big chunk of my creative effort
and studio space. I like the process too.
Recently I’ve printed and made aprons using the NEHOC Screen
Printing System (above). I bought the kit about
8 years ago now and it’s been great for testing designs and small runs. Your
design can be a photocopy or best of all a good old pencil drawing, which I
used a lot. You place your artwork against the thermal film (a mesh pre-coated
in thermal emulsion).
A cute tungsten
filled lamp fires creating heat so that the carbon of the drawing reacts with the
film. You then peel the film away from your artwork (which is very satisfying)
and it’s ready to print. Double sided tape attaches them to a plastic frame and
print away.
It’s been a brilliant method and I’m sure it must have looked like I was doing some weird science experiment with huge flashes of light emanating from my old shed or dinning room.
It’s been a brilliant method and I’m sure it must have looked like I was doing some weird science experiment with huge flashes of light emanating from my old shed or dinning room.
Homemade frame stretches the mesh film for a beautiful print. As you can see I've used this screen a fare bit, doesn't look it but it's a clean screen. |
The trick to a good print with this style of mesh is to not use too much ink and use
a stiff squeegee. Load the squeegee with ink rather than laying it on the screen also helps.
With a good even coat of ink on the squeegee, one pull is enough or you can end up
flooding the image. There is always lots of experimenting with pressure and
different types of squeegee and ink as well. On really small images a plastic card similar to a
credit card works really well.
The only down side is the bulbs are one use only, so a bit
of waste and the film hates humidity as I found out moving to Darwin. I lost
all my unused film as it was just in a roll and any exposed screens that were
not stretched in a frame.
NEHOC is phasing out this system but have brought in an excellent
substitute that I’ll talk about next time. You can check them out at http://www.nehocdirect.com for some great
screen printing product and equipment.
I’m going to go roll in some paint, that’s my kind of
normal.
xOx Luna
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