Random Thoughts

I found this scan from last year that I hadn’t used yet.  It’s by Caro, and (again) it’s from an early issue of Raw Magazine.

Hey! Another perfect exposure! I seem to have cracked the code, at least on smaller screens.  For larger screens, I’m still getting uneven exposures and wash-off at the edges…

Yay.  Good print.  Now what can I do to experiment…  Hm…  Hey, I bought some fluorescent paint today:

Eurhm.  That doesn’t really work as a single layer.  It needs to have a white layer underneath it…  Hm…  Perhaps I could try to do a registered print?  This is a pretty small image, so perhaps it’ll work…

Nope.  After applying a white layer and then curing it, the shirt shrinks like half a centimeter.  So doing registered prints has to be done before curing the first layer, perhaps?

Instead I did a very-off-register print with a second, red layer:

(Notice how the red is off by half a cm at the left edge and a cm at the right edge.)

That’s kinda a thing.  Hm.

Anyway.

After doing so many printing experiments based on comics, I thought it might be nice to do one based on a film.

Like Alphaville.

Eh.  The screen for the lamp turned out … not very good.

The eye was kinda successful, but kinda more creepy than I expected.  Yeesh.

Oh well.

I wanted to do a print that would end at the neck, so when I saw this Charles Burns image, I just went with it.

And it just worked.  I used a pretty soft squeegee.

But I got a pretty heavy paint deposit around the collar:

Looks quite punk, though, so I don’t mind.  But I wonder what I’d have to do to not get the paint bunching up there…  Hm…  Lighter squeegee action?

Even worse, I over-cured the paint (with my hot air gun).  Ruined the neck.  Gahh!

Ok, try again…

Hey, nice.  That’s dark blue, white, gold and red paints.

I thought the likelihood of me totally ruining this shirt was pretty good, so I printed two copies.  The second one in silver, white, yellow and blue.  But both turned out pretty swell.  Whodathunk.  I must finally be getting some kind of control over my squeegee technique…

I wanted to try more over-printing to see whether anything exciting happens.  So I took one of the Jimbo t-shirts I did a couple of weeks ago and made one final Daltokyo logo print.

Nothing weird happened, but that looks kinda nice!

(Both the Jimbo image and the Daltokyo logo are by Gary Panter.)

This one went well until I got to the black layer:

I forgot to clean the squeegee after the gold layer, so the black one got a bit muddled.  Which isn’t a good thing if you’re doing this kind of print. If it isn’t crisp it looks like a mistake.  Which it is.

I usually wash the screen between each printing, which takes a lot of time.  I wanted to see what happened if I used the same, unwashed screen several times…

Well, that’s not what I expected!  It’s weird how the paint-on-paint stuff almost goes inverse.

The other effect was perhaps more to be expected.  When I moved the screen, without cleaning it, it picked up quite a lot of ink which it then deposited — looking rather like dirt.

But I like the idea.  I have to print more of this Mark Newgarden image taken from “Love’s Savage Fury” and see what happens.  I should get some light, but not white, shirts to print on…