I'd Like to Teach the World to Screenprint...

...Starting with Barbara and Jill, two nice ladies from Staffordshire. Barbara and Jill booked onto my Summer Screenprinting Class in August at Birmingham Printmakers.They both bought along some interesting black and white photographs which they wanted to screen print. I'm certainly not an expert on screen printing using photographs as I mainly work with illustrations and text but I printed their images onto acetate and hoped for the best. At the start of the class Barbara and Jill coated a selection of screens with photo emulsion and once these were dry they exposed their images onto the screens. After washing out the images the screens turned out surprisingly well.

Both Barbara and Jill produced a series of two colour designs by printing simple coloured backgrounds first and then adding the photographic images ontop. They experimented with metallic inks and mixing different colours on the screens and both got some really lovely results. Barbara used gold ink which gave the effect of sepia tones whereas Jill mixed bright pink and blue for her background. When combined with her back and white image of a snowy mountain scene the result was stunning as it looked just like the aurora borealis. The images the ladies printed were almost A3 and printing that size can be hard work so it was a long day and I hope they have recovered.