Studio Brief 2: Printed Pictures
Further Screen Print Tests

 Having been able to reproduce my cat design so successfully in the screen print workshop I decided to go straight into trying to screen print the refined roughs that I was happy to develop into final prints.

Given how long the process of preparing screens is I decided that it would be best to fit 2 designs onto one of the larger screens as to save time. This meant that I could prepare and print to designs in the space of two days rather than four. Trying to be efficient time wise seems very important at this point given the limited availability of the print room/print beds especially when trying to fit print time around other modules and other students also wanting to print.

Selecting the designs/preparing the negatives 

The design that I was most eager to try screen printing was the unicorn skull design as, like I've previously stated I feel that it is the strongest visually due to the level of interest the dramatic lighting adds whilst also best conveying the surreal yet subdued atmosphere I had wanted from my designs.

 I decided to also try printing the design of the woman stood by the window as, much like the unicorn scull, the use of the two moons is a direct reference to Murakami's work but is also quite a subtle way of adding in the offset surreal element to the composition. As I had found the oil pastels a little too thick I decided to use china marker when drawing out the larger, revised designs for these two images. Other than this change the process of preparing the negatives digitally for print was the same as I had done for the cat design as I had found this process to be very effective.

 Printing

As I was still unsure on how to accurately predict the result the overlay, I decided to play it safe with these two design and use process inks (cyan and magenta) as I knew they would go well together visually as well as create a distinct third colour.

With the first image I tried to get the full range of colours where as with the second I tried experimenting with using just two colours but creating the second from the overlay. Although this isn't how a necessarily want to produce my prints for this project I think there are some benefits from it as when lining up the two layers you don't have to worry about white lines been created, something I find really jarring, when the two layers are slightly out of line.

I think the first skull print is definitely much more successful due to the use of 3 colours rather than just too. However I do quite how the second image isn't fully frame off computationally due to how the negative space around the window runs out of the edge of the image.