Random Thoughts

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!

Today I’m going to attempt a real screen printing.  I’ve selected an image from Daltokyo by Gary Panter — the first drawring from the first strip.

I’m printing on a black shirt, and the drawing is with black lines on a white background.  So I can’t really print the lines themselves, but I have to print the white background instead, so I have to create an inverted print on the transparency.  (It’s very confusing.)

Side note to summarise a bit what I’ve done wrong so far.  And hopefully learned a bit from:

1) There’s a huge difference in transparency quality.  I’ve bought three different “normal” transparencies (often called “overhead transparencies” or “OHP”), and they’re all too “pebbly” to be used for much of anything.  That is, they’re very coarse, so you get a very uneven distribution of ink.  In other words, you get a lot of white spots where you want total blackness.

2) All inkjet printers aren’t created equal.  The first one I had, an HP Officejet, printed out quite badly onto transparencies and other plastics.  Most people who do stuff like this seem to prefer Epson printers, so I got one of those, and it works perfectly.

3) There are different types of squeegees, and if you use a squeegee that’s not meant for printing onto clothes, it’ll be a lot more difficult to get a good result.

4) You need lighting to expose the emulsion.  Look at my professional-looking new rig:

The recipes say “use either a 250W for this exposure or a 150W for that exposure”.  Well, guess what.  It’s virtually impossible to get any incandescent light bulbs in Europe these days, because of the world ending in a heat death or some other kind of trivial thing. But I’ve managed to score two 105W halogen bulbs that approximate 150W incandescents, allegedly.  And I’ve bought two really cheap Ikea desk lamps.

So here we go.  Exposure.  The chart says 16 minutes for 250W and 74 minutes for 105W, so 2x “150W-ish” should be…  35 minutes?…  At 40 centimeters.

Washing the silk.  I take the head off of the shower thingie and blast it.  All the non-exposed bits rise off!  Looking good, but I could perhaps have exposed for five more minutes…

I bought a huge whopping cutting board to have something to strap the shirt onto, so that I have an even surface to print onto.

And then we just squeegee away.

Result!  Sort of.

My squeegee action isn’t perfect yet.  I pushed too much ink through on the right there.  Probably because I’m right-handed…

Anyway, if you know what you’re doing (and I’m vaguely starting to), and you have all the right equipment, the turnaround on screen printing is just a few hours. It’s kinda fun and it looks nice once you get the hang of it.

IT”S WORTH IT!!! PLEASE LET IT BE WORHT IT!!!!!1!ONE!!