Screen Printing Peckham Print Studio

I learned how to screenprint recently at the Peckham Print Studio. I have screen printed in the past, and this was much of a refresher course, which was very helpful and I learned some new knowledge from a very knowledgeable Print Technician Tom, who was teaching the class.

The Print class started with looking through past artworks of previous work, and then we prepared our artworks using Photoshop, which would allow us to expose them to the silkscreen. The photoshop process involved converting the artworks to black and white bitmap images, which created a more defined black line. Depending on how many colours you are going to use within your print, we were printing with 2 colours today. The artworks separated into 2 different layered artwork for the 2 colour screenprints. Once the artworks were prepared and separated. they were then printed on to tracing paper, which would allow the UV light to pass through the non-black areas, and expose the artwork to the silkscreen.

We moved to the printing facilities, to learn more about screen printing, the first step was applying an emulsion which will be exposed to the artwork on the exposing unit, once the screen is exposed using UV light, the design is burned on to the screen. to make the design visible, the screen is washed to remove the emulsion, once washed the design is left behind of the screen ready to be screen printed.

The screen was dried and placed on to the screen bed, once the screen was registered to the design, we were ready to print. Using one of my illustrations, I firstly Printed the orange colour of the leaves and left that 1st layer to dry, and then the 2nd black colour was applied. There is a level of trial and error to printing. The first few prints did not print well, and the screen was not washed thoroughly and the screen was clogged in certain areas, which involved cleaning the screen once again, to achieve a good print.

The Peckham Print Studio has some great facilities, which I will certainly be taking up and using in the near future to print more of my work.