Live Project Information

         For my live project I will be going to a studio in Newcastle with a few other people, while I’m there I will be working on screen printing learning the steps and techniques involved in this process. I’m really looking forward to doing this because for the most part I mainly work in 3D and practically all the work that I have produced has been 3D so I never really get anything physical from the work I do. What I mean by that is everything is digital I can look at it but I would have to go on my computer and for someone who really loves 3D I do like to have physical art my room is covered in many different peoples artwork that I have collected over the ears, it would be nice to add some of my own work to it.

            As well as this I have always been interested in screen printing and what you can do with it unlike printing which is boring in my opinion just sending something to a printer and not being involved at any point. Its nice to get hand on with it and feel like you had a large part in producing the finished product I guess people may say you could get the job done faster with a printer so why wouldn’t you but I like the idea of being directly involved in the process for example using screen printing makes you directly responsible for how good or bad a print comes out if you don’t get everything correctly from the placement of the paper to the techniques you have with spreading the ink. I don’t have any experience with screen-printing beyond me just knowing that it is a type of printing. But ill try and list a few things that I believe give screen-printing a much bigger appeal over normal printing.

·      You can print onto more than just paper, I can print onto practically any surface that I desire as long as it will actually take paint, materials like wood, cardboard, plastics, rubber, metals some of these may have to be treated first for the paint to actually adhere properly.

·      As well as different solid materials that are for the most part stick you can also screen print onto clothing of practically any type of material and it gives you a much nicer look than that horrible iron on rubbish that is like wearing plastics on your clothes.

·      You have to know what your doing, getting all the little things correct is very important from how long you expose the screen to light when you are doing a exposed image, how to spread the paint correctly and re flooding the screen so that paint doesn’t go dry ruining your next print and many others.

·      There is a certain look to screen- printing that I cant really explain but you can just tell that it has been screen printed and not just printed off a laser jet its almost like the paint is richer and has more depth without sounding to much like a nonce.

·      Feeling of being involved with the process beyond clicking a few buttons and then watching a printer spit out multiple sheets of identical images.

·      That little one brings me to another point, although screen printing can be very quick and once you get everything down can produce almost perfect prints all the time you will get some variation and this opens up to development and ideas you may never of thought of before maybe its where the paint didn’t pass through enough or its moved and doubles over but it looks interesting. That is something you will never get from a printer the only difference you will get is when you run out of ink and it starts to fade!

·      Because its harder to print using the screen method when you do actually get a one right and it doesn’t have anything wrong with it in your own eyes which will probably be the most critical you really feel a sense of achievement and it makes that print even more special. So if you were to sell it you would be happy about it and would have more of a story to tell about that print telling the potential buyer how much trouble you had to get it perfect this will make the customer feel like they are getting something which took a great deal of effort and wasn’t just printed out of a printer.

·      There are some effects like mixing colours in the rig to be spread of the screen that you just couldn’t get from the choosing a colour on the computer unless you had a image of what you wanted.

Artist Research

I have only looked at a few people and not really in any great depth because I already had a idea in my head of what I wanted to do for this live brief, well the style of work anyway. But ill talk about a few artists who work really shows what the screen printer can do.

Mcbess this artist I became aware of last year while at pictoplasma and I loved his work then but I didn’t really know much about the technique but now that I do I appreciate his work even more. The amount of detail in his prints and fine lines that he creates for hair and beard texture must be a huge paint to try and get perfect prints of! But it the detail and amount of different things that he puts in his work that really impresses me how he can fit all those different things into it but still have them all in amazing detail is crazy. Someone else who went to pictoplasma got a sketchbook with one of his busiest artworks on it and we must have spent 20 minutes looking at it picking out different things that you don’t really notice until you start looking closely.

He also puts a lot of things that make you laugh into his work while we were looking through we saw so pretty strange pieces of art work some which were just really weird but other really fit with the whole fell of the piece and you could tell why he had put that there.

These are just a few example of his work and you can already see where I am coming from if it was me designing and laying this out I would get so lost in it all I wouldn’t know where to put the next thing or how to keep the flow right so that I could keep adding things but knowing that there would be enough room. I know there would be some planning involved and he probably draws many things separate and sees how they could fit together in one piece but I don’t know this for sure more of a guess. Either way it just goes to show what is possible with screen prints and how much detail you really can get out of them! Its not like you may believe if someone told you that screen-printing involved a piece of material stretched over a frame which you squeegee paint through, you would probably get the impression that you could only do the most basic of shapes.

Printing onto other materials is another thing that is great about screen printing your not just locked into paper which a traditional printer will.

My Experience.

Went in to do some screen printing today in Newcastle first time in the studio, it was a really nice space with everything you could possibly need for screen printing and many other things but I needed a printer and unfortunately the one in the studio was broken so I couldn’t screen print any of my work today because they were originally going to have us make images that would be first printed out on the vinyl cutter then have those places onto the screen to run the ink over but the designs that two of us made had to may fine details that the vinyl cutter just wouldn’t be able to cope with even though it is a really good one that has cut out some really detailed stuff as we were shown.

But my experience was not spoilt because of this and I still managed to learn a lot of new things about the screen printing process and have a lot of fun in the process we got there at around 3 and left at about 8 so it is a lengthy process but I’m sure everything could be don’t faster that what we managed on our first attempt and we had a few problems along the way the first one being photocopying the design onto a sheet of tracing paper they do this so that the light will not be let though on the actual design so that the screen when washed will reveal the very detailed perfect design that you can then pass ink through to make your print, but the photocopier was acting up be we still got it in the end!