Sometimes size does matter

Today I have been working on my largest screen to date. I usually print without using the arm on the printing press as I prefer to feel the squeegee directly, but due to the size of this screen, using the arm was a must.

Even with the arm, printing on this scale is a challenge due to my size. Because I cannot reach over the screen, it is not possible for me to apply a strong and even force over the entire screen, and so the areas closer to where I am positioned are printed more clearly than the areas further away.

The image is a repetitive tally chart pattern intended to be printed repeatedly over a large surface to suggest a the duration over which it was made. I am slightly concerned that it may be regarded as a product of boredom, and be associated with prisoners counting the days they have been in prison, but want for it to be suggestive of the labour intensive activity that forms the image, and indicate an element of obsessiveness with mark making. 

I began printing with black ink in order to get a good idea of how the print will turn out and detect any problem areas. 

I then worked my way through different colours, hoping to achieve a gradual shift from one colour to the next.

Screenprinting, mark-making experiments

Over the past few days I have enjoyed spending time in the printmaking workshop doing some screen printing.

The images that I exposed to the screens included a number of scanned mark making experiments that I did with silicone on different surfaces, a pencil drawing, and a few ink drawings of the little sculptures that I have been making.

So far I have concentrated on printing the mark making experiments, and have been testing printing on different materials and using different combinations of colours.

With the image above, I printed onto tissue paper and the delicate tissue paper stuck to the screen as the vacuum on the print bed was not working. When I peeled it off, the crumpled mark left on the screen was interesting, and so when printing the next image I did not flood the screen, but allowed the squeegee to pull through the remains of the ink left from the previous image, leaving the pattern of the crumpled tissue paper.