Couture: Wrestling

I vividly remembered there being lots of great imagery in the Love and Rockets calendars from the late 80s.  After just a few hours of looking through boxes, I finally found the 1990 calendar, which features this beauty:

By Jamie Hernandez, and I think that’s probably Rene Titañon.  (I’ve been meaning to re-read all of Love and Rockets, but I haven’t been able to make up my mind whether to just read all the issues chronologically, or read either the Beto or the Jamie stuff first…  The latter might make it easier to follow the storylines, but it feels weird splitting things up that way.)

So, after scanning, it printed it out with “lp -o fitplot”.  And that swapped the orientation, so it’s way wider than I thought it would be.

But I measured it against a t-shirt, and it fits on an XL shirt.  I thought it might be fun to have a super-wide print, so I just went with it.

(I ripped the silk (i.e. nylon) off of an old frame — I seem to be unable to wash the emulsion off of the screens.  According to the interwebs, I’m either exposing too long or too short, and the Speedball Emulsion Cleaner may be too wimpy.  So I’m stapling new screen fabric onto the screen:

Staple staple staple.  But that means that I can save the screens, which seems fun…)

I didn’t let the emulsion dry long enough (it rested for three hours), so the bits that had the thickest layer of emulsion was still moist.  You can see that at the top, where some of it washed off.  Tsk, tsk.  Well, lesson learned.  Screen-printing isn’t all that much work, but you have to wait a lot for stuff to dry, and I’m kinda impatient.   I should probably only do this on weekends where I can start the screen earlier in the day.  (But the only room that’s dark enough is the toilet, so I can’t pee while things are drying.  *crosses legs*)

I’ll try printing it anyway…

Eurhm.  I didn’t notice the extra wash-off in the general boobal area..  Hm…  perhaps I can cover that up with some gaffa…

I wanted to experiment with printing dark colours on a black t-shirt, and this seems like an ideal image for that kind of thing. So here we go with dark purple.

Hey, nice!  It’s almost illegible, though, so I should do a second shirt in a brighter colour.

But I’ll count this one as a success.

The minimum turn-around for a print is eight hours, apparently.  First staple the screen, then put emulsion onto the screen.  Then let it really dry for four or five hours.  Then expose for 35 minutes.  Then wash it with a hose, and let it dry for two hours.  Then print, wash the screen and the squeegee, and then cure the print.

Done!