Screenprinting on Fabric
For our final screenprinting project, we were given a fun assignment to screenprint on sheets. The theme of the assignment was “A print to wake up to”. Basically, you can take that any way you want whether it be an illustration of a nightmare, something you enjoy waking up to everyday, or something comforting. I decided to make a cute little design of my dog Kota, who is my favorite little buddy to wake up to. I wanted to make my design similar to an american traditional style tattoo with bright oranges and greens and black linework. Our class planned to install a tunnel in the hallway near the printmaking studio that is created by all of our printed sheets.
Screenprinting on fabric is similar to regular screenprinting, but when you have a giant king size sheet, it looks a bit different. This assignment required us to print all over two sheets and with 2-3 layers of color.
To start, I laid my white sheet on a big table in the fibers studio. Then, I taped my screen in the areas that were open so ink wouldn’t go through onto my sheet. When printing large on fabric, you don’t have to hold your screen down with clamps and you don’t have to flood. Flooding the screen is basically where you pull ink through the holes of your design with the squeegee while its not on top of the paper or fabric, so that when you do go to pull a print there is already ink in those holes. Since I was trying to line my design up with all the layers, I didn’t flood my screen in case I needed to adjust it once I put it down. I basically just printed my black line design over both of my sheets. Then I realized I needed to start with the other layers instead of black so you could see the black linework. The third sheet I printed was finally looking how I wanted it to. I decided to keep one sheet black and white, one with two colors, and one with all three-printed correctly.
Yesterday we had our critique and we put up all of our sheets in the hallway. It was such a fun project and I’m happy we get to do fun installations like this in class. It’s the perfect addition to our hallway to bring some excitement to finals week!
