SCREENPRINTING: Everything There Is to Know By Jamie Dillion, Nick Paparone, Luren Jenison, Caspar Williamson, and Mike Perry
First published 2017 by Kiel Wamsley and the Academy of Arts University Davenport, IA – San Francisco, CA Cover design, typesetting, and original photographs (pg. 28, 44-45, 52-53 & 54): Kiel Wamsley Full spread pg. 26 -27: Cat’s in the Cradle II, pink variant, by ManOrMonstor Full spread pg. 44 -45 and 52-53: Gnar City Clothing Full spread pg. 76-77: Hello Print Studio Printed by Blurb.com Special Thanks to William Culpepper and peers of GR 330 OL1 Disclaimer: All parts of the book were created as a student exercise. All rights are reserved to the original artist and/or authors who appear in this book. Permission to use their work for this publication was not granted. No part of this publication may be reproduced, in any from or by any means, electronic or otherwise. This book cannot be sold or circulated. Profits on this publication is prohibited. Furthermore, Kiel Wamsley acknowledges that all work (unless otherwise stated) is someone else’s property, and will not seek profit or take credit for work that is not his own.
Chapter 1: The History of Screenprinting History of Screenprinting……………………………… A New History…………………………………………… Multicolor & the Squeegee……………………………… The Evolution from Silkscreen to Screenprint………
07 08 09 10
Timeline…………………………………………………… 18 Chapter 2: Screenprinting Explained Screenprinting Explained……………………………… Tools……………………………………………………… Kinds of Inks……………………………………………… Putting it together……………………………………… The Process in Brief……………………………………
29 31 42 43 46
Chapter 3: Artist Spotlight Artist Spotlight…………………………………………… Aesthetic Apparatus……………………………………… Landland………………………………………………… Gnar City………………………………………………… Pietari Posti……………………………………………… Rose Stallard……………………………………………… Frea Buckler……………………………………………… Atelier Deux-Mille……………………………………… Steve Frykholm……………………………………………
55 58 60 64 66 68 70 72 74
Index……………………………………………………… 78
 CHaPTER 1
HISTORY OF T SCREENPRIN ING
1
HISTORY OF
SCREENPRINTING
People have always needed a way to duplicate images or words and apply them to the things in their world. Whether you’re trying to make artwork, spread a religion, sell a product or show people pictures of your new baby, the ability to reproduce images in mass quantities has always been a good way to get the word out. The earliest method of reproducing images was stenciling, a tradition that has been used in some form or another in almost every culture throughout history. A stencil is essentially a template with holes cut out of it so that paint can be applied to the surface under the stencil. Stencils are often made of paper or plastic, something impermeable to paint. Stencils are practical and still have their uses, such as spray painting a lumber logo on a stack of plywood boards, but they have their limitations. The most frustrating quality of stencils is that you always need to have “bridges” of the stencil material to connect the floating parts of an image, which affects the aesthetic of the image being painted. For example, the letter “0” can never look like a big dough nut in a stencil, because that circle of white in the middle has to be connected to the outside of the stencil with “bridges.” Then the “0” looks like “().”
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T HE HI S T ORY OF S CRE E NP RINTING
Fig. 张 纸 样 one of twenty-six paper stencils (Katagami), ca. 1850–1899
A NEW PROCESS Trying to get rid of those “bridges” sparked the development of screen printing. In Japan, printers began to use human hair and silk filament to suspend floating parts of their images. Ink could easily pass around a fine threadlike material, so the bridges were invisible. This idea probably led to the use of a net of threads, or a screen, and so the screen-printing story began. Through trade with the West and the natural spread of information and techniques, the early screen-printing methods eventually reached England, where the screen as we know it was patented by Samuel Simon in 1907. Samuel Simon, a sign painter working in the early l9OOs in Manchester, England, is widely acknowledged as the pioneer of screenprinting as we know it today. Inspired by the need to discover a faster way of producing his signs, Simon realized that if he could develop a method of applying the silk-screen technique to his daily work, he could revolutionize his business. He began perfecting a basic wooden-frame method, developing an emulsion that could he painted onto the silk to block out the images or stencils. Then, using a stiff brush, inks were forced through the screen. This simple process allowed Simon to print signs continuously, rather than hand-painting them individually. This new process was soon being described as ‘silk-screening’, and in 1907 Simon was rewarded a patent for what was to become the first screenprinting process.
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MULTICOLOR & THE SQUEEGEE
Left: John Pilsworth giving a lecture.
It would not be long before screenprinting began to attract the attention of the art world. In up 1914 San Franciscobased artist and printmaker John Pilsworth recognized the benefits of this process and began experimenting. Pilsworth look out a patent for a multicolor printing device based on Samuel Simon’s method. By combining several different stencils and using a number of different screens and multiple colors, he was able to produce vibrant, multicolored imagery in editions. This period also saw the development of the ‘squeegee’, a flat, rigid board with a flexible rubber edge that was designed to force printing ink through the screen. The squeegee allowed for far more efficiency and uniformity in printing than was attainable with the stiff brushes previously used with Samuel Simon’s method.
Bottom: Silk-screening process early 1900’s
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T HE HI S T ORY OF S CRE E NP RINTING
Left: Inspecting test prints of commercial adhesive labels. Reverse: Woman working in textile factory.
THE EVOLUTION FROM SILKSCREEN TO SCREENPRINT In the 1930s, the development of flatbed screenprinting in Lyon, France, extended screenprinting techniques into textile design. In the flatbed process, textile printers applied lacquer to a mesh to create a stencil. The frame was placed on the fabric and a squeegee was used to force a dye paste through the unlacquered areas of die mesh. The commercial print industry has been the major catalyst for the development of screenprint technology. Early chain grocery stores turned to screen printing when they needed a consistent but quickly renewable way of advertising deals on apples and hot dogs. Sign hand-painters and window painters, who painted really awesome bright and graphic signs on the stores, were a little pricey and tedious, and letterpress or lithographic printing was prohibitively expensive and time consuming. The use of screen printing by these stores led to big growth in the industry. The industry kept its materials and techniques largely a secret until the Depression era, when the Works Progress Administration (WPA) organized a unit of artists to work with printers. This was the beginning of screen printing’s transformation into a fine art medium. However, it was a long time before the art world fully embraced screen printing, because it was viewed for so long as a purely commercial process.
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T HE HI S T ORY OF S CRE E NP RINTING
Fig. Bothwell, Dorr. Two Corbes. color serigraph. 1944. annexgalleries.com
THE TERM “SERIGRAPH” The term ‘serigraph’ was created in the hope that it would distinguish the ‘creative art’ in silk-screening from the commercial or reproductive uses of the process. Carl Zigrosser, founding member of the National Serigraphic Society, coined the term by combining the Latin word for silk, sen, with the Greek word for ‘to draw’. Today, many artists and galleries still refer to fine-art screenprints as serigraphs - the term arguably evoking a sense of ‘high art.’ Today the term ‘silk screen’ is not widely used because it no longer describes the discipline accurately. Post-war developments in new plastics saw the silk used in parachutes replaced by polyester, which proved to be far more reliable than silk and much cheaper to make, as well as being much stronger and reusable. This synthetic product also produced infinitely more durable screens. Thus, the screen in a screen-printing frame is no longer made from the traditional silk or organdies of its origins. Terylene and nylon, as well as polyester, are now widely used.
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12
Fig. Checklist from the exhibition, “National Serigraph Exhibition,” held at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts in 1947.
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T HE HI S T ORY OF S CRE E NP RINTING
Fig. Olef Alcher, Munich Olympics poster, 1972.
Fig. Andy Warhol, Muhammad Ali #182, 1978.
SCREENPRINTING TODAY In the 1940s, the Hollywood film industry began to realize the benefits of this new printing method, and thousands of movie posters were screenprinted and hung in film theaters across America every week. It wasn’t long before other industries took advantage of the process. Sports, music, theatre and travel companies began recruiting artists to produce designs that would go on to be screenprinted. Poster campaigns like that designed by Otl Aicher for the 1972 Munich Olympics became commonplace. Screenprinting is still as influential in political and social movements as it has ever been. Both the music and fashion industries rely heavily on the medium to produce garments, T-shirts, and merchandise. The screenprinted gig poster and art-print scene has never been more prominent on either side of the Atlantic. The DIY methods of screen-printing were embraced in the heyday of punk in the 1970s, and became a driving force behind the movement. Andy Warhol is associated with the artistic side of screenprinting and was responsible for popularizing the discipline. By introducing serigraphs to the United States during the Pop art movement of the 1960s, Warhol opened the eyes of many of his contemporaries. Artists found its potentially large scale and solid, bright colors perfect for expressing
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14
Fig. Rose Stallard, Walkabout, 2016
F ig. Joe Fig, Inka ’s Shoes, 2007
the ideas of the time. Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg in the USA, and Eduardo Paolozzi and Joe Tilson in the UK, helped make the technique familiar. Warhol is particularly identified with his garishly colored screenprint portraits of cultural icons of the time, including Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and Muhammad Ali. Today, screenprinting has become a sophisticated process. As industrial applications have grown, better machinery, such as vacuum beds and exposure units, has been developed, enabling more elaborate and experted printed editions to be made. More importantly, much finer and thinner oil-based inks, along with the introduction of waterbased non-toxic inks, have revolutionized the medium, allowing for longer print runs and safer working environments. To meet the rise in popularity of screenprinting in recent years, many artists studios, such as New York’s Lower East Side Printshop and the UK’s Print Club London, are now allowing public access to equipment in exchange for a nominal membership fee. Galleries and art fairs worldwide are recognizing the demand for screenprinted work, with new screenprint-specific events appearing every year.
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T HE HI S T ORY OF S CRE E NP RINTING
Filjians make stencils out of
Paper stencils are used in Japan.
Crosses are printed on Crusaders’
banana leaves by punching tiny
uniforms by stretching haircloth
holes in leaves to make shapes,
over wire barrel hoops and block-
then push vegetable dye through
ing the nonprinting areas with tar.
the leaves. The images are printed
Stencil printing is used in combi-
onto handmade dark cloth.
nation with woodblock printing to make playing cards.
1 500 B.C. SCREEN P R IN TIN G
A.D. 500 to 1000
Middle Ages 18
Buddhists illuminate teachings of
Stenciling is used in every nook of
Jean Papillon, the leader of
the Buddha with stenciled designs
decoration, from painting a Federal
French wallpaper technology,
called image prints.
eagle on the seat of a chair to apply-
uses stencil techniques to sup-
ing repeated stenciled images to walls
ply a fashion-hungry Europe with
to look like expensive wallpaper.
thousands of different wallpaper patterns.
A.D. 868
C  olonial America 19
Early Eighteenth Century T HE HI S T ORY OF S CRE E NP RINTING
Japanese printers glue silk threads
Printers in Germany and Lyons begin
The diazo process, which is the
and hairs in a pattern to brace the
to use silk as the stencil carrier.
precursor to photo emulsion, is in-
floating parts of the stencils they
vented. It is a photographic process
want to print. This eliminates
where a transparent positive is con-
the “bridge� part of the stencil.
tact printed onto paper coated with
This new method of printing is
photosensitive fluid. It is used as a
called the yuzen style.
proofing technique, but the technology leads to the photo emulsion
Late Eighteenth Century SCREEN P R IN TIN G
with which we are familiar today.
1870
1890s 20
S.H. Sharp invents a stenciling ma-
Samuel Simon of Manchester, England,
Grocery and other chain stores in
chine that is basically a revolving
patents the use of a silk screen as a sten-
the United States need locally pro-
stencil that pushes ink through
cil carrier. He uses brushes and paint
duced signs that change frequently
the stencil onto continuous textile
rather than a squeegee
to advertise sales. Screen printers
yardage rolling beneath.
are able to underbid sign painters for the jobs.
1894
1907
1920s 21
T HE HI S T ORY OF S CRE E NP RINTING
Ohio screen printer Louis F.
Fine arts screenprinting begins as a re-
Profilm is replaced by a lacquer
D’Autremont invents Profilm, a
sult of a Works Progress Administration
film called Nufilm invented by
shellac stencil film tissue. A de-
(WPA) program when artists and print-
Joe Ulano, a print technician in
sign could be cut out of this film
makers requests that screen printing be
New York. This new film is very
and then adhered to the screen
a federally sponsored project. Anthony
stable and doesn’t stretch when
using an iron. This is a much fast-
Velonis, a printer and painter, is chosen
cut. Water is used to adhere the
er technique and allows for a
to coordinate the effort.
film to the screen.
1930s
1931
much sharper printed image.
1929 SCREEN P R IN TIN G
22
Carl Zigrosser, curator of prints
The textile industry uses screen
Serigraphs becomes a defunct word
at the Philadelphia Museum of
printing to achieve very saturated
in the 1960s as the distinction between
Art (PMA), coins the term seri-
colors. This leads to the inven-
fine art screen printing and commer-
graph to refer to fine art screen
tion of the rotary screen-printing
cial printing disintegrates.
print, as opposed to a commer-
machine, which has cylinder-shaped
cial screen print.
screens with a squeegee inside pushing ink as it turns onto fabric moving beneath.
1941
1960
1960s 23
T HE HI S T ORY OF S CRE E NP RINTING
Andy Warhol’s exhibition of
Warhol opens The Factory, which serves
Pop Art embraces processes of mechan-
screenprinted Campbell’s Soup
as a studio for his many art projects,
ical reproduction, setting the trend for
cans revives and popularizes
including screen printing with his
duplicates and ready-made. The focus
screen printing more than any-
primary printer, Alex Heinrici, who is
turns to the end product, not necessarily
thing since the WPA.
followed by Rupert Smith.
the process used to make it.
1962
1963 to 1968
SCREEN P R IN TIN G
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1958 to 1975
Health and chemical regulations
Screen printing has been embraced as
lead to the heavier use of other
a medium of the people. Do-it-yourself
printing techniques, such as digi-
(DIY) culture and open-source informa-
tal printing, electrostatic printing,
tion lead to a totally democratic medium:
ink-jet printing, laster photo
Anyone can screen print, even with lim-
printing and thermal transfers.
ited means and experience, and produce reasonably good results.
1990s
Present day 25
T HE HI S T ORY OF S CRE E NP RINTING
SCREENPRDINTING EXPLAINE CHªPTER 2
2 SCREENPRINTING EXPLAINED
Screen printing is a very direct method of printing in which the printer pushes the ink through a mesh screen directly onto the substrate, or surface receiving the image. The mesh fabric stretched on a frame acts as a carrier for the image to be printed, holding the image as a stencil. Only one color can be printed at a time. To print a design with multiple colors, multiple screens must be made—one for each color of the design—and printed in registration with each other. Registration is the means for getting multiple colors to match up when they are printed. Since it is such a direct printing method, screen printing gives you control over every part of the process, and with some experience you can achieve all kinds of wonderful effects. To make prints at your studio or home you’ll need to gather some supplies that might not be familiar to you. So you’ll need the basic things outlined in this chapter to begin your days as a screen printer.
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S CRE E NP RI NT I NG E X PLAINED
SCREENS Screen printing can’t happen without a screen. Most basically, the screen is a piece of mesh tightly stretched over a wooden or metal frame. The mesh is made of holes through which ink can freely pass. To create a screen print, some areas of the mesh are blocked so ink cannot pass through. In other areas, the mesh is left open to create image. Ink passes through the unblocked areas of the screen, leaving the printed design on the material below screen. Screens and screen-making materials can be pun based at most craft or art stores. You’ll probably need to go to a hardware store to buy materials for making your own screen from scratch.
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FRAMES Mesh is stretched on frames made of aluminum or wood. Aluminum frames are very light and never warp. Wooden frames are nice and heavy and don’t move around if you are printing without the frame clamped into hinges. If you are making your own wooden screen, keep in mind that the lighter the wood, the more likely it is to warp. Canvas stretcher bars are a cheap material to use, but they are likely to crap out after a few washouts. Having really stable joints at the corners is important. You’ll know it’s stable if the screen feels like one piece of wood, instead of four bars of wood with wonky joints. The corners shouldn’t move, or become a rhombus, or teeter-totter if the frame is flat on the table. Premade wooden screens are a good bet for the at-home screen printer because they are stretched very taut.
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S CRE E NP RI NT I NG E X PLAINED
MESH Mesh is the “silk� of the silkscreen. Think of it as the screen on your screen door. It is sold by the yard or by the roll. Mesh comes in different dualities, although nearly all is made of nylon. The fineness of the weave of the mesh determines the resolution of your print. The lower the number of threads per inch, the fewer holes there are, and the more jagged the edge of your print will be. The holes are like pixels in a digital image. The higher the number, the finer the mesh. A fine thread-count mesh such 00 holes per inch would be used for printing on paper, whereas a thread count such as 100 per inch could be used to print a T-shirt. Mesh also comes in different colors. These colors affect the way light diffracts, or spreads, when the screen is being exposed to burn an image. For example, orange diffuses light the least, so it is used to print very fine, precise images.
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 PHOTO EMULSION Photo emulsion is the most common material used to block the holes in the screen. Putting an image onto the screen is a photographic process involving coating the mesh with a thin layer of light-sensitive photo emulsion to fill all the holes. When the emulsion is dry, the screen is exposed to light with opaque artwork blocking the areas to be printed from being exposed to the light. This is called burning the screen. Then the screen gets sprayed out with water. Where light was blocked by the artwork, the holes in the mesh of the screen are open. Where light hit the screen, the holes of the mesh remain filled with emulsion that hardened due to contact with the light. It is good to follow the exposure-time directions for the emulsion you buy, but keep in mind that exposure is the most trial-and-error part of screen printing, and you’ll have to experiment a lot before you get it just right.
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S CRE E NP RI NT I NG E X P LAINED
SCOOP COATER To coat the screen with photo emulsion, you need a scoop coater. We have seen people do it with cardboard, squeegees and other stuff, but what you want is a scoop coater. Don’t mess around here. A scoop coater is a trough that fits inside the inner dimensions of the frame of the screen. It can be narrower than the inner dimensions of the screen, but it must be wider than the image you want to print. We have a few different squeegees around at all times. You’re going to need different sizes for different projects. The squeegee must be small enough to fit inside the frame of the screen without ever touching it. This means, at the largest, the squeegee should generally be 4” (10cm) narrower than the interior measurement of the frame of the screen.
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SQUEEGEE A squeegee is the tool used to drag the ink across the screen and push it through the mesh. It consists of a hard rubber or urethane blade set into a wooden or aluminum handle. There are many different hardnesses of blades. A softer, more flexible blade will print on more substrates, while a hard blade will leave a very thin ink deposit that won’t cover many substrates besides untextured paper. You can tell how hard the blade is by trying to bend a corner of it with your fingers. A medium-hard blade is good for pretty much everything. There are also different shaped tips on squeegee blades. A rounded tip pushes a healthy amount of ink through the screen and is rarely necessary. A squared-off tip or a chisel-shaped tip is good for most any printing.
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FILM POSITIVE A film positive goes by many names: artwork, transparency, stencil, positive and Mylar. In short, it is the graphic you want to print. All the parts you want to print with your screen have to be opaque—usually black—and all the parts you don’t want to print must be clear. The artwork has to fit inside the printing area of the screen. The clear part of your film positive can be vellum, acetate or clear Mylar. The black part can be pretty much anything opaque. Light cannot pass through the film positive in areas you want to print. The area where the light is blocked is the design that will print. The most commonly used film positives are computer printed transparencies. Other film positives can be made with paint markers, India ink on a brush or in a rapidograph pen, cut paper and found objects. When you are creating the film positive, think about it as if you’re making black whatever you want to print.
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BURNING A SCREEN “Burning” or “shooting” a screen is what we call exposing the photo emulsion to light. When photo emulsion is exposed to light, it hardens and adheres to the screen. The areas blocked from the light are then washed out. Burning the screen is the most fun and frustrating part of screen printing. It takes some practice before you get it right, but it’s easy once you get the hang of it. There are lots of different lights you can use to burn a screen. The more ultraviolet (UV) rays the light source has, the faster the exposure time will be. The sun is actually a really good UV source, and exposure using the sun is really fast. The next strongest man-made light source for UV is a metal halide bulb. Most people who are doing screen printing semiregularly and who don’t have a professional exposure unit make one using UV fluorescent bulbs, clamp lights or halogen work lights. See page 52 for step-by-step instructions on burning a screen
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RECLAIMING THE SCREEN The exposed screen can be used for printing over and over until you want to burn a new image on the screen. The mesh on the screen can be washed out using a reclaimer chemical. Reclaimer is a solvent that basically melts the hardened emulsion out of the screen mesh. It is toxic, so you have to be sure to take safety precautions, such as wearing gloves and a respirator on your face. After you reclaim a screen, you can recoat it and use it with a new image. See page 79 for step-by-step instructions on reclaiming a screen.
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INK The ink is the most straightforward part of printing. You choose the ink based on the surface onto which you’re printing. Use fabric ink for fabric, mostly water-based ink for paper, sometimes oil for paper, and plastic-or epoxy-based inks for printing on metal and plastic. Many different inks are available for silk-screen printing. Some can be used for a number of different applications; others are intended for very specific uses. In most cases, the decision of which ink to use in a given situation is made early in the process. When paper only is considered, the decision is fairly easy, and a wide variety of inks is available for use. With materials such as glass, plastic, metal, and fabric more consideration must be given to the choice of ink. Also, the choice of ink will influence or determine the stencil to be used with it.
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KINDS OF INKS Basically, the inks for printing fall into four distinct categories: (1) evaporation inks—ethyl cellulose, nitrocellulose, acrylic, vinyl, and some other types of plastic inks; (2) oxidation inks—enamels and synthetic enamels; (3) thermosetting inks—plastisol and hot inks; and (4) catalytic inks—epoxy and certain polymer inks.
Evaporation Inks
The largest group of inks, evaporation inks dry by solvent evaporation, getting harder with age and undergoing no chemical change while drying. As a result they can be redissolved or rewetted with their original solvent. Ethyl cellulose inks are the most common general purpose inks for printing on paper, cardboard, Masonite, and wood.
Oxidation Inks
Oxidation inks primarily include the enamels and the synthetic enamels. As the name implies, they undergo a chemical change during drying that renders them insoluble in their original solvent or thinner They offer higher gloss and greater durability than evaporation inks and can be printed on a very wide range of materials, with excellent adhesion to metals, foils, glass, some plastics, wood, cardboard, Masonite, and paper
Thermosetting Inks
All thermosetting inks require heat in order to set or dry completely. They never become tack-free through air-drying. They are used when great durability is required or when a superior mechanical bond is needed on metals, glass, or plastics.
Catalytic Inks
SCREEN P R IN TIN G
Most catalytic inks are epoxy types that require the addition of a catalyst just prior to printing. The inks do not dry, but cure (polymerize) as a result of the catalytic action. These inks, like the thermosetting inks, will rarely be used by the artist. They are used when maximum durability, adhesion, and resistance to chemicals are required.
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PUTTING IT TOGETHER
FILM POSITIVE
PHOTO EMULSION
FRAME & MESH
INK
SQUEEGEE
PREPARED SCREEN
PRINTABLE SURFACE
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THE PROCESS IN BRIEF Screenprints can be created in many different ways. Traditionally either an emulsion or ‘block’ would be painted directly on the screen and left to harden - leaving only the negative space for the ink to pass through. The integration of hand-cut patterns and other layers to form stencils further allows highly detailed multiples to be produced. Many leading practitioners still favor the hand-cut method; however, the most commonly used and versatile method in practice today uses photo emulsion and computer-generated artwork. This method enables the printing of fine line drawings, small and detailed type, and photographic imagery.
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1 COATING THE SCREEN First, the screen must be coated with light-sensitive photo emulsion using a coating trough. Starting at the bottom and working upwards, the screen is coated in one firm, continuous movement to achieve a smooth, thin coat of emulsion. The process is repeated on the reverse side, and any drips or excess emulsion are removed with a piece of card or a plastic spreader. As the emulsion is light sensitive, the screen is left to dry in a dark room or an area without any UV light.
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2 EXPOSING THE SCREEN The positives are secured to the screen using clear tape to ensure they do not move. They are then exposed to UV light. Once your screen has been exposed it must be washed out or ‘blasted out’ in a washout area. A hose with a forceful spray attachment, or ideally a power hose is used to spray both sides of the screen with cold water, moving the jet of water over the entire image. Where the Opaque parts of the positive were exposed, the image starts to fall out. This process is continued until the emulsion has been washed out of the entire image area. When the screen is dry, it is checked for any holes or open areas that may have occurred during the exposure process. The screen is laid on a lightbox and screen filler is used to block these areas so no ink will pass through them during printing. Finally all four inner edges of the screen are masked off with waterproof tape to make sure no ink bleeds through the frame, and the screen is ready to print.
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3 PRINTING There are numerous premixed inks available to screenprint with. The base ingredient of these inks is acrylic paint, which must be mixed with screen-print medium before printing. The medium acts as a retarder and ensures the acrylic does not ‘dry in’ on the screen and block your image. The bed is marked at each edge to indicate where the paper should be placed. Tape or cardboard can are used for registration guides. These ensure that the image is printed in the exact same position. If multiple colors are being printed, guides are pivotal for accurate registration. The guides are taped in place and the frame is lowered in to the printing position. Newsprint or unwanted old prints with a flat surface are used to check that the image is printing with clarity. The test paper is placed in position and the screen is lowered into printing position. A generous amount of ink is then scooped out at the end of the screen nearest to the printer. The screen is lifted slightly so it is not in contact with the bed or the paper, and the ink is then ‘flooded’ evenly and smoothly away from the printer with the squeegee. With the screen lowered into printing position, and keeping the squeegee at a 45-degree angle, both hands are used to pull the ink forward in one firm movement. The screen is then lifted up, and the ink is again flooded back to ensure the screen does not dry in. When the test print has been checked, the first print can be pulled onto the final stock. The print is then removed and placed in the drying rack, and the process is repeated until run is complete.
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ARTIST SPOTLIGHT CHªPTER 3
ARTIST 3 SPOTLIGHT
Screen printing has significantly altered how the art world and the general public determine what is and isn’t art. In the 1960’s, artist such as Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Ed Ruscha began using what was seen as an exclusively commercial process to create works of art. Screenprinting wasn’t really acknowledged as an art medium until the middle of the twentieth century. Screenprints were not considered prints because they were not created using plates, and they were not considered paintings because they were created in multiple. Now screenprints have the best of both worlds, being widely used in print, graphic design world, and also being given space in prominent galleries and museums. Some things that begin as screenprinted graphic design end up in art galleries, such as really good concert posters, wallpaper and even t-shirts. This chapter showcases a few contemporary artist who pursue screenprinting.
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A RT I S T S P OTLIGHT
AESTHETIC APPARATUS Often considered Minneapolis’s best unknown design team. Aesthetic Apparatus was founded in 1999 in Madison, Wisconsin, by Dan Ibarra and Michael Byzewski as a fun side project. Over the years, their limited edition, screenprinted concert posters have secretly snuck into the hearts and minds of a small, rather silent group of socially awkward music and design nerds. Now, Aesthetic Apparatus is a full-time, full-fledged, insanely unstoppable, and occasionally award winning design megastudio.
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Opposite: Various posters inside Aesthetic Apparatus studio. Top Left: Frown The Rabbit Hole, Three color screen print (lovely light blue / chaos yellow / bleak black) on archival cream stock Top Right: Agent Starve, Two color screen print (red, black) on archival cream stock. Bottom: Unknown
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A RT I S T S P OTLIGHT
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LANDLAND Landland is a very small graphic design and illustration studio in Minneapolis, Minnesota, started by Dan Black, Jessica Seamans, and the late Matt Zaun in the spring of 2017. The Landland studio doubles as a fully functional screenprinting shop, mainly focusing on record sleeves, posters, and art prints. They will soon start publishing some short-run books and a handful of very limited-edition records. Minneapolis tens to get very cold, so it often makes sense to stay inside and draw tessellation patterns or the names of bands or messed-up billboards or things that you remember from back when it was fun to go outside.
Opposite: Gig Posters Volume 2, four-color screenprint on 100# French cover stock Top: Sierra Hul, six-color screenprint on 100# French cover stock Bottom: Into It. Over It. & The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, four-color screenprint on 100# French cover stock
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 Fig. Untitled (Chippewa Lake Park), four-color screenprint on 100# French cover stock
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 Fig. The Black Keys, four-color screenprint on 100# French cover stock
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GNAR CITY Started by Andrew Guy, Gnar City, is a screenprinting company in Davenport, Iowa. Gnar City specializes in custom t-shirts, but has expanded to include embroidery, skateboards, hats, and more. In addition to the custom t-shirts, Gnar City, has its own clothing line featuring unique illustrations and quirky themes. After years of hard work Gnar City is a fully fledged screenprinting company.
Opposite: Gnar City Logo, prepared screen. Top Left: Pineapple. One color hand printed on yellow. Fabric. Top Right: Shipwrecked. One color hand printed on cranberry. Fabric. Bottom Left: Gnar Wars. Two color hand printed on black. Fabric. Bottom Right: Ratrod. Two color hand printed on black. Fabric.
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PIETARI POSTI Finnish illustrator Piertari Posti was born and grew up in Helsinki, Finland. After graduating from Lahti Polytechnic with a bachelor of arts in graphic design, Posti worked fro a few months as a graphic designer before moving to Barcelona, Spain, in late 2005, where he pursued his illustration career. His work has been featured in numerous publications around the world, including the New York Times, the Guardian, Wired magazine, and, in his words, “many other magazines no one has ever heard of.�
Top: Metropolis, on display with bookshelf. Bottom: Metropolis, use of blacklight ink
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Fig. Metropolis, 6 color screen print. Poster.
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ROSE STALLARD London-based illustrator Rose Stallard is the creative director and co-founder of Print Club London. Splitting her time between Print Club, commissioned work and her own projects the iconic illustrator brings the Print Club brand to life with her inimitable 1970s fanzine-style artworks and edgy typography. Everything Rose does, from curating new talents to producing exclusive artworks for the gallery is injected with a little hint of Rock ‘n’ Roll.
Left: Print Club London logo Opposite Top Left: Cassette Tape Opposite Top Right: Hot Shot, exclusive to Print Club London Opposite Bottom Left: Pucker Up, Valentines Day, 2017 Opposite Bottom Right: Walkabout, Flim4 Summer Screen Prints 2016
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Top left: Daze 2, 2016 Top Right: Blink, 2016 Below: Unknown Opposite top-down, left to right: Glide 3, 2016 Daze 3, 2016 Dazzled, 2016 Springs 2, 2016 Skip 2, 2016 Zing 6, 2016
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FREA BUCKLER Frea studied Fine Art, Printmaking at Central Saint Martins in London and more recently passed her Masters degree with Distinction in Print at UWE in Bristol. Frea’s latest work retains the precision and technique of screenprinting but adopts an improvisational method more like drawing or painting to produce series’ of unique prints. This process embraces the balance between chaos and control. The probable but impossible forms resemble unfolded boxes or origami –bending, folding and opening out in different directions. They play with illusion and perception, they fit and don’t fit, there are loose ends and spaces in between. They are visual representations of our processes and behaviors, such as poise and balance, rather than objects.
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ATELIER DEUX-MILLE Atelier Deux-Mille is a French collective of four artists and graphic designers: Nicolas Delpech, Benjamin Stoop, Lucas Faudeux, & EugĂŠnie Babion: we explore the image degree of iconicity in using etching and screen-print processes in our quest. As image diggers, they sample and turn them into some kind of figures of speech, threw a synthetic visual language. They try to hijack the constitutive elements of image, either conceptual or material, in order to create a sophisticated printed universe.
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Opposite and below left to right: Enjoy Chaos 1, 2, 3, two-color (CMY) screenprints Below far right: Enjoy Chaos 4, three-color (CMY) screenprinting
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STEVE FRYKHOLM Steve Frykholm’s design career at Herman Miller began with a large ear of sweet corn—a curiously appropriate symbol, its rows of kernels forming an orderly grid and its roots originating in the watery, agrarian landscape of Western Michigan. Soon after arriving at the Zealand-based furniture manufacturer, in 1970, Frykholm was asked to design a poster for the company picnic, named the Sweet Corn Festival. The posters are so highly regarded as exceptional examples of graphic design and pop art that the collection is now a permanent part of MoMA.
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INDEX A-C
N-Q
Aesthetic Apparatus, 58-59 Archer, Otl, 14 Atelier Deux-Mille, 72-73 Buckler, Frea, 70-71 Buddhist, 19 coating. See photo emulsion commercial printing, 10
National Serigraph Society, 12 Nufilm, 22 NY Lower East Side Printshop, 16 Papillion, Jean, 19 Paolozzi, Edurado, 16 Philadelphia Museum of Art, 23 photo emulsion, 35 coating, 47 Pilsworth, John, 9 Profilm, 22 printing, how to, 46 Pop art, 15, 24 Pollock, Jackson, 16 Posti, Pietari, 66-67
D-F D’Autremout, Louis, 22 diazo, 20 England, 8 exposing, 48 Fijians, 18 film industry, 14 flim postive, 38 frames, 33 Frykholm, Steve, 76 G-I Gnar City, 64-65 grocery stores, 10, 21 inks, 41 catalytic, evaporation, oxidation, thermosetting, 42 J-M Japan, 8, 18, 20 Landland, 58-61 letterpress, 10 lithograph, 10 Lyon, France. 10 Middle Ages, 18 Munich Olympics, 14 mesh, 34
I NDEX
T-V
R-S Rauschenbreg, Robert, 16, 57 San Francisco, 9 scoop coater, 36 screens, 32 screen reclaimer, 40 screenprinting process, 46-51 seigraph, 12, 23 Sharp, S.H., 21 silkscreen, 12 Simon, Samuel, 8 Stallard, Rose, 68-69 stenciling, 7, 11, 18, 21, 38 “bridges,” 7, 20 squeegee, 9, 37
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Tilson, Joe, 16 textile, see photo 12-13 tools, 31-41 Ulano, Joe, 22 UK’s Print Club London, 16, 68 Velonis, Antony, 22 W-Z wallpaper, 20 Works Progress Adminstration (WPA), 10, 22 Warhol, Andy, 14, 24, 57 Zigrosser, Carl, 12, 23
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