OUGD406 - Studio Brief 2 - Screen Printing Final

In preparation for the screen printing I mixed a white ink and a silver/metallic ink. I tried to make both of them as opaque as possible for the designs to show as I was printing on black paper.

I had a few issues with the screen itself once it had been exposed and washed - there were areas where holes in the screen had been mended so I had to paint on extra photosensitive emulsion so the spots wouldn't come through on the design. You can see where I painted where it is darker on this image. Unfortunately for me one of these dots overlapped my design so I had to try and re paint the correct shape in. It meant that I couldn't print straight away but I think that I got away with it in the end.

Another problem that I encountered was that the screen still had emulsion in some areas where it had been exposed (it hadn't been washed properly) so part of the design cut off. You can see it where I circled it here - it is a lot more prominent on the black paper. To tackle this I had to use newsprint to do lots of "pulls" of ink to force the emulsion through the screen. This just involved flooding and printing the screen over and over until I saw a visible difference. 

This was one of my final prints for the first colour of silver, as you can see the part where the emulsion is is still not quite right but there was nothing I could do about it without re-exposing the whole screen again which would have taken a lot of time. Before printing the text I cut them down to A4 so I would know how to position it correctly.

The type side was fine and I had no problems at all. In fact it printed perfectly on most of the prints I did. I did have to print over it a couple of times due to the nature of the ink on black but I was pretty happy with the results.