This week’s class has been more focused on resists. While last week was more about applying colour in a pattern to the screen and then printing through it so you get both colour from the pattern and the space around it, today has been more about positive and negative spaces, and when used with the deconstructed printing techniques, or previously printed fabrics, it opens up a whole new raft of possibilities…

This is the first technique:

After fixing, much of the green colour washed out yielding a lower contrast between the green and yellow, this has potential as a background for more screen printing :):

Combining technique #1 with some circular resists:

After fixing:

Technique #3 involved making our own stencils, this was quite a neat process and one I can see myself doing again (it is a lot cheaper than buying thermofax screens that’s for sure):

After fixing I was pleased to see the purple didn’t completely overpower the base print on the right hand side, if you look closely you can see different shades of blue / violet around the edge:

I was a little bit naughty and bought a couple of thermofax screens, the leaf is alright but I am most impressed with the chrysanthemum flower (in fact I got a little carried away with it). It is a little bit prone to “ghosting” though, so you need to keep cleaning it between prints but I like it so much I am now debating on using this on the dress I am currently making from nuno felt.

After fixing, the green colour faded significantly again but the violet is just as vibrant as when it was first screened:

This is a print with “ghosting”:

Again, the sketchbook was perfect for mono-printing the remaining print paste from the screens at the end of each print run.

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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:

For those of you reading by email, this is the link to the web page: blog post