This is week 3 of Ruth Lane’s Experimental Screen Printing class but before starting on the new methods, I still had a deconstructed screen that I made last week to use. I’m not sure if it was applying the print paste to the flat side of the screen or leaving it to dry for a week but it lasted much longer than the others.

I used a double resist for these first few prints (I couldn’t “resist” 😉 using at least one of this week’s techniques!), firstly on wet prefelt, I clearly didn’t do a very good job of cleaning this screen as you can still see the bubble wrap print in the top left circle:

After fixing, even though I let the print paste dry first, the colours still bled:

The same screen on dry prefelt:

After fixing, I really like this piece although I am contemplating cutting out the discs to use in a project. I don’t want to print / dye over it as I like the patterns as they are:

You can still see the bubble wrap sneaking through:

More conventional screening onto dry prefelt:

The same piece after fixing:

This time, screening onto wet felt, I love how the wet felt and released the blue pigment. The right hand side was some mono-printing with bubble wrap:

After fixing, although this is the smallest piece by a long way (only 15 x 20 cm) it is my favourite out of this batch. This might just be a coincidence but using wet felt vs wet prefelt seems to make the colours bleed less:

Then I really started to work the screen quite hard to try to get the blue lines to come though, I ended up pouring some water over the middle section, I think you can see the wool is slightly darker and it was a very effective way of releasing the blue colour, so much so that it almost appears black in places.

After fixing:

Repeating the same process to release the remaining blue colour around the edges of the screen:

After fixing:

Finally, on Ruth’s recommendation, I used my sketchbook to mop up any remaining print paste at the end of each print run, I’m not sure how I will use these, (most of my sketchbooks read like a technical manual of hare-brained felt oddities, I rarely ever paint or draw in them for pleasure) but I think most of them are attractive already:

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