Screen printing: A guide to

Screen printing is a brilliant printing technique for bold, solid, stylized designs. In its most basic form, it is composed of three layers: a substrate as the base (card, fabric, vinyl, etc.), a stencil in the middle, and a woven mesh screen on top. Additional equipment required are a squeegee, thick paintbrushes, screen printing ink, and textile medium.

And now, a simple step-by-step on the process.

1. Draw your stencil. A stencil should ideally be made using something thicker and stronger than printing paper or newsprint paper; card or cartridge paper is what you should go really go for. Remember that only the only the outlines are necessary, so make them nicely opaque/bold.

2. Cut out your stencil. Where shapes in the stencil have 'holes' in the inside, cut the holes out separately and retain them for future use. Alternatively, connect these think of these holes as 'islands'. In other words, leave at least two strips of material connecting the hole with the rest of the main body of the stencil unless you want it intentionally otherwise.

3. Set up the equipment. The substrate goes at the bottom, the screen on the top, and the stencil sandwiched in between. Ensure that the stencil covers at least the entire area of the mesh of the screen. If it does not, use masking tape to cover up smaller gaps or prepare additional pieces of paper/another substitute to cover larger gaps. This is to avoid ink being applied to anywhere other than where the cut out areas on the stencil are.

4. Prepare the ink: I. On a separate surface to the screen sandwich, lay out the colour palette to be used. To each one, apply a proportional amount of textile medium to make them easier to work with; this paint to textile medium ratio should be about 60:40. Use thick paintbrushes to blend each colour with its allocated textile medium.

5. Prepare the ink: II. The ink should be applied in a line on the top of the mesh screen and span the entire width of the screen. For multiple colours, divide this line into the selected colours scheme; make sure that they overlap of a gradient is required.

6. Apply the ink. Grab the squeegee and dab it into the line of ink. Then, for the neatest results, ensure that someone or something has secured the screen down onto the work surface tightly. Firmly grip the squeegee and pull it downward to cover the entirety of the stencil. You should hold the squeegee an angle of roughly 60°, using only the edge of the blade. When correctly done, a kind of 'smooth' scraping sound will be produced by the squeegee.

7. Repeat. Once the stencil is covered after the first application of ink, lift the squeegee off of the screen and proceed the to dab it again in the store of ink at the top of the screen, this time with a little more force to remove the excess. Again, pull the squeegee down across the stencil as described above and repeat this once or twice more. It is especially important that the placing of the squeegee on these repeats is consistent if multiple colours are being used, in order to avoid unintended mixing of the colours. 

8. Hey presto. Lift the screen and stencil together slowly to reveal the result on the substrate. The first attempt will (almost) never be perfect, however by understanding where improvements can be made, it is easy to refine the technique.

9. Try another substrate. Screen printing is great for reproducing the same designs over and over again. A piece of card of another colour or maybe even a new material altogether, can be placed underneath the stencil and steps 5 through to 8 can be repeated for this new substrate.

10. Wash up. Due to the sheer amount of ink and textile medium used, thoroughly clean the mesh screen and other equipment and to aid their longevity and re-usability.

I believe that this type of printing is most suitable for designs with large, bold shapes as opposed to those with a heavy amount of line art or smaller details. It appears that my technique still requires some refining as the gradients do not appear to be entirely consistent with successive prints, which tells me that I should be more careful with the placement of the squeegee. In addition, in the future I could create stencils which retain the 'islands' in order to experiment with the different style that would produce.

A taster of web design

 

There's more to web design than meets the eye. Every little detail must be tailored towards the audience and theme of the site; colour is one of them. However, it is not just the individual choice of colour that can affect the perception of something, rather the combination of colours: how they contrast, how they compliment, how they play a role within the colour scheme. Take 'childish' and 'vibrant' from the image above, for instance. In terms of colour, the two terms can be used interchangeably but delving into the different connotations of each word and deconstructing them can lead to suitably different schemes. Vibrant implies bright, contrasting colours that lust for attention, hence why I had selected green, yellow, and red: the green and red compliment each other while the yellow injects some flavour in between them. 

 

As mentioned previously, children are also associated with the vibrant colours but the stereotypical 'blue for boys, pink for girls' can be applied here, hence why I had selected these two and placed them adjacent to each other. I had decided to use orange to round them off but on reflection this colour does not work terribly well and is a rather random choice. Instead, I should have used something that made allowed for a dark tone/mid tone/highlight combination in conjuction with the pink and blue similar to what is present in the 'intimate' colour scheme. Now, intimate. Often associated with love, right? Well this is why I selected the obvious red and a variation thereof - violet - for a darker tone. Three variations of red (e.g. a purple) would have been quite overwhelming, which is why I chose a white to give the colour scheme flexibility, either to use it as a base or a highlight.

With such a restricted palette to express a word and its many implications, this task refined my skills with both being critical about colour and communicating my thought process. 

 

 

 

Responding to Henning Wagenbreth

Henning Wagenbreth's piece for the Memory Palace exhibition featured a 3D sculpture made composed of wood, canvas, and acrylic paint. It was a seemingly random mix of comical illustrations and words painted on cuboids that made it as eye-catching and fascinating as it was confusing.

For the response, the first step of the process was to select a piece of text, be it movie quote or extract, novel passage, etc, that I was fond of and brainstorm all of the characters, words, imagery and settings that come to mind when this text is read. This aforementioned quote was: 'Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view', as said by Obi-Wan Kenobi in the film Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. 

I had decided for my response to resemble one of the cuboids from Wagenbreth's sculpture: this meant that I combined all four aspects that were brainstormed. The word was 'truths' was selected in conjunction with the imagery of the 'Duel on Mustafar' from another Star Wars film, this time Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. I selected this imagery and setting as the my chosen quote was one of the repercussions of this battle on the volcanic planet. 'Truths' summed up the premise of the duel, as certain secrets were disclosed at that point in the story. The duel itself featured two of the most important characters in the entire saga: Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi. All in all then, this response is faithful to the original: miniature worlds and stories squeezed into (or onto) boxes.

The make the response relevant, I had to retain many aspects of Wagenbreth's style. This included the simplified human figure, the very loosely accurate representation of settings, imperfect perspective (i.e. note the intentional inconsistency of the edge lengths), solid and false colouring, and a great deal of free-hand drawing.

5 websites that do it right

CVG

The colours suit its purpose and audience of electronic entertainment news - nothing too outlandish, and everything is clean cut and consistent. The whites, greys, and blacks blend into the background while the red leaps out a you, signifying an important element, be it the logo, search bar, or the subheadings.

BBC News

The red banner at the top of the website is instantly recognizable. The white text against it gives clarity and the black ordinary text mixed with blue text for links means the format is consistent and the site becomes easier to navigate as a result.

IMDb

The logo's yellow/gold and its incorporation into other elements such as subheadings is the stand-out colour. It's application against the black in the header and white in other parts does not make for a most cohesive combination, but the combination injects character into the site and makes it memorable. The vertically grey-to-white gradient of the background follows the transition from the black header to the white lighter main body, which provides a harmonious feel.

Xbox

The Xbox corporate green is very prominent which arguably means that the entire header section is the centrepiece of the page design. Assuming this theory is correct, this is why the rest of the page is aligned relative to it, in that the content is found within the header's width all the way down the page, which makes for a very consistent, clean layout. The white text against the green fits well. The footer is a stark contrast to the header in that it is wider and darker, which gives the page a solid 'foundation' and a kind of perspective as a result as well. 

Twitter

Simplicity at its best. On the main page (upper image), the dark grey bar/header with the bluebird on the left separated from the text on the right means that the logo, despite its size, always stands out. The blue/white colour scheme in the main body gives an incredibly calming feeling, and the greeting in the centre of the page demands attention because it is in a contrasting colour - black. The yellow 'Sign up' button nearby also sticks out like a sore thumb, because it is there to do just that -  persuade people to sign up. The rest of the website (two lower images) is much like the main page, only inverted. The underlining header is a textured blue, whilst the header is a solid grey.

Deconstructing the style of Henning Wagenbreth

Wagenbreth's piece above appears to have been constructed using wood, acrylic paint, and canvas. This is because the finish of the colours on the physical version being characteristically solid hints that the wood blocks have been wrapped in canvas, on which paint black outlines are painted first and then filled with colour. The application of both materials and colours is very bold and cartoon-like, which results in wild miniature worlds on separate blocks that then clash when united to form a geometric architectural  oddity chiefly composed of cuboids. The abundance of bright, and highly contrasting tertiary colours coupled to imaginative, false-coloured characters and patterns provide it with a lively, hectic, rather juvenile feel.