Printmaking workshop at the DCA

I have been a bit quiet on here since last week as I have been working to finish my proposal, so since which is handed in now I have time to write about a class I attended last Saturday at the DCA studio.  The workshop was called "Andy Warhol Workshop" and was essentially a crash-course in screen printing.  I decided to attend as a lot of the work I have been writing about on this blog was created by screen printing - Shepard Fairey, Shigeo Fukuda and many others have used this method in their work. Going along to the class allowed me to try a new technique and conveniently make some media tests for the pre-production module.

To start the process, the class leader Claire took our images we had brought in and scanned them so that we could tape them under the printer press as a reference.  Mine was this one (below, post-paint stains) which I took from a Toni & Guy ad (intense proposal research and extra-curricular responsibilities meant I didn't have adequate time to prepare my own image).

Fig.1 Original scan

Using these images, we then painted out on the screen press the areas we wanted to stay white, in order to block in the background colour.  The paint we used had a name I cannot remember, but it essentially blocked any paint from getting through onto the paper.  After we were satisfied with what we had painted in, we used cellophane to do a test print, and used masking tape to mark the position on the paper we wanted to print.  Below was my first "layer", drying on the rack.

Fig. 2 First layer of print

We continued this process, blocking in each layer we wanted to keep the previous colour (e.g the face was blocked out in order to keep it pink when the yellow layer was applied in Figure 3).   The layers eventually built up to the image on the screen in Figure 4.

Fig. 3 Second layer of yellow.  I kept this one as is.

Fig. 4 Blocked out layers on the nylon screen.

In the meantime, in between helping us, Claire had taken our original images and exposed them to a UV light to bring out the negative image.  These were used to add the final black layer to the images, which was printed on last and really brought the image together.  I wasn't able to get a photo of my own image so another guy kindly let me take a photo of his.

Fig. 5 Nkem's black layer print on cellophane

Fig. 6 Prints by others drying on the rack

Due to some rookie errors, my images came out a little bit misaligned in some places, but the end effect was a very retro-grunge one which surprised me.  I had ideally wanted something quite neat, but everyone agreed my mishaps had produced work that had a nice bit of dynamism to it.

  In my digital work I have been playing around with recreating printing aesthetics from Warhol's era, as Illustrator allows for the creation of halftones and stereoscopics in digital format.  I thought the results here were a nice, if accidental, little nod to that.   In addition to that, the screen prints related to a lot of my research for my proposal on a device of visual persuasion called "familiarisation".  Familiarisation is used to great effect by Shepard Fairey, Bruce Emmet and Charles S. Anderson, among others.  It is centred around recreating techniques and visual styles in their work, such as screen printing, which deliberately references work from artists in eras such as the 1960s (notably Robert Raushcenberg and Warhol, whom this class was based on) which we know as a culture to be associated with political action.  I was really interested in this idea as it could potentially play a big part in answering my research question for my dissertation.  The prints created in this workshop can at least be a starting point in this area.

 Below:  some of my end prints.

Fig. 7 This one came out wonky but I quite like the effect

Fig. 8  Not entirely sure how the yellow managed to line up so badly, but it gives the picture more depth!

Fig. 9 Image with all layers, blue background.  

Fig. 10 Print with all layers, purple background.

Creating work physically was something I realised I had missed so I hope to try this again.  I'm not sure if I will have time before deadlines so I'm pleased that I at least got to experiment with the screen printing techniques.  I hope to try creating holographs next too.