Revisiting screen printing

It was time to return to a practical process that I had initially experimented with in the beginning of the year - screen printing. The purpose of this was to ascertain whether my technique had improved using lessons learned from that session.

To remain relevant and progressive, I decided to recreate a portion of my blog's background for use on the reverse side of my business card. However, due to the relative complexity of this pattern I was forced to incorporate some digital manipulation, i.e. adding a grid and adjusting the some details in the gradient; this was not detrimental to the aim of this session as the practical process still accounted for the majority of the design.

Firstly, the organisation and execution of the stencils was excellent, which meant a good base for the printing. Acquiring the ideal hue of blue for the card to be printed upon was unsuccessful, hence I conceded and used the card that was available instead, again, this is not a total loss as I can alter this using a graphics-editing software. Utilizing what I had learned while screen printing, the preparation of the acrylic paint was streamlined and effortless. Working on my own, the process of printing itself was rather tricky as I had to hold the screen in place with one hand and drag the squeegee down with the other. I deduced that this was most likely the reason that the application of the paint was troublesome; that, and the possibility that the mesh screen required tightening.

It appeared that successive prints resulted in faltering quality of the print. In the first attempt the paint was contained very well by the stencil, albeit the gradient itself was corrupted slightly by some areas 'bubbling up'. This was likely due to the viscosity of the paint, which can be changed using textile medium. Following this, the second attempt had streaks of blue appearing in the white, probably because of  inconsistency of the placing of the squeegee in terms of the gradient's layout. For the last two attempts that were both on a single sheet of paper, it was apparent that the stencil was already worn as the paint bled through and created undesirable flares of colour outside of the stencil. As well as this, there were patches without colour because of an insufficient amount of paint and textile medium to match.

Overall, the quality of the prints was satisfactory, albeit not perfect, meaning they were still easy to work with digitally despite some suspected variables in the process that were beyond my control degrading it. If I were to revisit screen printing at least once more, I would like to work with equipment that is properly maintained as well as work with a partner, both for the purpose of neater results.