Sunday 18 January 2015

Screen print disasters

My experience with screen printing has been one train wreck of a disaster after another.

Here's a list of things that went wrong and the failed prints to prove it.

  • I made my ink too think to fit through bitmap dots so it dried into the screen 
  • Some phantom white rocks of acrylic paint stuck into my screen
  • I didn't know to flood the screen after each print and was instead trying to wipe the screen clean of ink each time
  • A mystery problem occurred while exposing which no print staff could explain but several of my screens just didnt expose at all
  • I put emulsion on too thick meaning the second attempt of exposing failed
  • Many of my screens had holes or blockages in which I noticed while I was using them, some I had to re-do, others I taped up the holes or allowed the damage to be an extension of the distressed aesthetic I'd attempted
  • I exposed my image too close to the edge of the screen so had to use a manual printing bed. Oddly I found this much easier as its not as heavy and strenuous as working on the larger beds and I find the vacuum disagreeable. 
  • I made my ink too thin and it was indecipherably pale
  • I made my ink too thin again and it sploodged everywhere
  • I lacked the upper body strength to put enough pressure on the squeegee so the print was streaky
  • The small bitmap dots meant i had to mix my ink much darker than I wanted it to look, this took many many attempts to get each colour right. 
  • Phantom blue ink appeared on my screen several times while printing rorschach and is on my final print
  • The yellow ink on my ozymandias print didn't come through the right hand side of the screen regardless of how much pressure I put onto it, this problem remained unsolved, by this point it was too late to re-expose the screen and try again
  • The brown ink in the nite owl print is pretty much the same colour as the orange
  • When removing the tape from my nite owl screen I pulled of a substantial amount of emulision, leading to the streaked dark orange marks on the bottom right corner of the prints, again I had not enough time left to clean and expose this again
  • In many of the prints the text is faint in some areas for unknown reasons. Multiple pulls only led other areas of the image to bleed or blur
I think thats everything that went wrong but there's probably much more

This is just a small sample of the many many prints that went wrong




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