New screen designs, and working out the kinks (in the not fun way)

I burned new screens today! But I've done that before- more importantly, I learned how to fix my fuck-ups on the new screens today. This is an important step, because my training with fine art serigraphy dictates that when you mess up a burn, you rend the fabric mesh asunder with your bare hands and rip your acetate stencil into bloody, floppy pieces for good measure. Which is all well and good in someone else's studio, but here in the land of limited resources (reality), I need to stretch my emulsion and screen shelf life as far as humanly possible. So when I fucked up all three burns today, I got creative with my emulsion, filled in the holes with a paintbrush, and wiped out my mistakes with stencil remover.

I'm not completely in love with the images yet, even less so having spent all day touching them up because I can't afford to wipe the screens and re-emulse. I used the rasterbater to enlargify some icons I've been playing with in gimp (a skull, octopus and Le Ravissement de Psyche for sheer perverse fun to see if I could even make it identifiable- see results below).

I only test printed one run, with the octopus, and it was the one that let me know where all the mistakes are. Thanks, free store clothes! I'm also realizing the difficulties in pushing so much INK through the screen, since these are my first full screen prints. What I wouldn't give for a squeegee that's the actual size of my screen to maintain some consistency- that might have to be where the money from my next etsy sale gets funneled to.

(Do you like this shirt? I am Not a Fan, but I am working with it. It will end up in one of my friend's closets, or the cheap-fuck-up-section of my etsy)