Skül- now with more paper!

It's snowing like fuckery outside today, but I had the Job of Doom that I've been trying to finish for my client (the one that has thus far suffered from expired chemicals, broken hoses, and lately, overly thick emulsion application), so I put on everything warm I could find and went out to the meat freezer that is my studio in the winter. That screen YET AGAIN failed to work, but I decided not to let it get me down and pull a bunch of prints I'm planning to give to folks when I go home to the East Coast fer Christmas. (I'm making a bunch of other ones, so don't go thinking that y'all know what you're getting early or anything).

My very advanced drying techniques, in the absence of a drying rack, consists of clothespins and a string of prayer flags. I'm finding that, working in my grimy studio without a sink or wash-out booth, that the 15 minutes we spent on cleaning up messy prints in class is increasingly more valuable than all the time we discussed using the humongous expensive exposure unit. And if anyone has any tips for cleaning up imperfections on paper, I'd loooove to hear them.

I started out with the screens I've already had some success with making into prints (das fishy, and Le Pixelation de Psyche), but I wanted to experiment with a third, so I got out my Skül screen and figured I'd print large before tearing the paper down to see how it looked. And because I was getting tired of black on white, I threw in some blue ink.

I fucking love how it came out- the blue adds a hell of a lot to it that I didn't expect, and I wound up with this great graphic rock poster look. I've been using color very tentatively up till now because I associate it with having to be used in layers, but I forgot how dynamic a simple rainbow pull can be.

Freshly pulled glossy wet ink! You can just see the blue tones in this one, I let the black generally overwhelm it to keep it simple.

Next hurdle- figuring out how the hell I'm going to get all these across the country without damaging them anymore.

Dream of Trees

Screenprinting has been driving me crazy lately. Strike that- the incredibly bleak weather in the Pacific Northwest has been driving me crazy lately. But 3 weeks of it being too cold or wet to work in my garage studio hasn't been helping.

Paid commissions don't care what my levels of mental capacity are from day to day, of course. I've got two big jobs ("big" here is on a level corresponding to my one-person studio operations- three big jobs will pay my rent for a month) that I wanted to get done during my week off. I prepped, burned, and cursed out two screens for washing out COMPLETELY before I realized that all my fucking emulsion was expired.

There's nowhere to buy emulsion where I am, of course. I can drive an hour to Seattle and get shitty Speedball crap-in-a-can, or I can buy a new gallon online and wait two weeks- neither of which is an option for two jobs that need to be done by Friday.

The third option (according to the internet) is to overexpose my screens. I still have unpleasant memories of overexposing my first screens, but the internet apparently thinks that this is a wonderful idea. I have two freshly emulsed screens in my drying rack right now waiting to try this tomorrow, and if it doesn't work we're going to have to get REALLY creative.

Other things I've been waiting for with increasing frustration: American Apparel to stop making me jump through hoops to wholesale their clothes. I want to buy their stuff, I want to buy it cheaply, I want to put my shit on it and sell it. You'd think they'd want this too, but I'm in the middle of filling out my third resellers sales ID tax form for them this week.

Up top is a piece I forced myself to translated onto acetate because I haven't liked anything I've been able to make come out of my pencil in weeks. Below is the version I'm going to try to burn.

Someday I'll draw something that I actually want to see on a shirt. Someday.

Fisheh Shirt

Screenprinting in cold weather SUCKS. Half the fun of screenprinting is getting to splash around lots of water when I clean out my screens. It becomes the exact opposite of fun when I'm working with cold, congealed inks that clog up my screen and take twice as long to wash out using cold water. Luckily, Michael left their coffee maker for heating liver of sulfur in the garage, so I've been heating water that way, but it still bites (and continues to take twice the time).

So the very self-motivated reason I finally got around to slapping that fish on a shirt was because I couldn't find anything to go with my new black pants when I was getting dressed this morning. That new Ryonet ink Chriset gave me is REALLY thick, so I thinned it down with silkscreening medium first and it flowed a lot better. I need to get fuckloads of medium if I'm going to keep using it, though.

Here's the newsprint test run I did last night in a fit of creative frustration (I haven't screenprinted anything in weeks because it's COLD and I'm a WIMP and I work in the studio all the time now anyways). I kind of like the halo of what I assume to be oil seeping into the newsprint, so I think I'll print a series on more absorbent paper and experiment with some color elements to make the fish more interesting. I'm really proud of this design because it's the first thing resembling concrete digital design work I've screenprinted and that is kind of cool.

I'm going to throw this on because it'll be done drying by the time I finish writing and get my ass to the metal studio, where I should have been hours ago instead of reading Amanda Fucking Palmer's blog. My performance and art brains always fight on Thursdays when the studio opens late and I run circus open studio at night.

Fisheh and business update!

I feel inadequate posting without some sort of pictoral image included, and since I don't have shots of my metal creation from today (a sort of copper monocle/spyglass eye piece), you get the fisheh I'm working to make into my next shirt design. I'm doing a lot with animal skeleton imagery right now, one because it's almost Hallowe'en, and two because it SELLS (see previous post, re DELICIOUS MONEY.)

I got a mixed bag in terms of printing jobs today- a client dropped off two shirts for me to do for her this morning, and I fucked up the second one (never put the screen back down after printing! Bad!). Luckily, I have a similar shirt in stock I can offer her, but I'm kicking myself for such a simple mess-up. I'd go out a buy an exact replacement but- with my Friend and Local Non-profit Discount- that'd run me exactly what I charged her for the job.

But in AWESOME news, I went over to Chriset's house today to talk about printing labels for her handmade bags, and she traded me SIX quarts of Ryonet Textile Ink for the job. White! Jet Black! Scarlet Red! Lemon Yellow! Royal Blue! Chriset volunteers at the Oly Free Store, where she scored the ink, and I asked her to keep her eyes out for any screens that wander in. I LOVE the free store.

In other awesome news, I ran into Kimya Dawson at Chriset's house, and we got to talking about how she wants to learn how to use some screenprinting equipment she bought. I gave her my contact info and told her I'd give her any of my excess photo emulsion chemicals- christ, it's the least I can offer her for that straight month I spent with her music in my ears music non-stop.

Final thought- I NEED MORE SCREENS POSTHASTE. Jesus. I either need to make more DIY ones myself, or start scouring Craigslist and Ebay for used cheap ones. TOO MUCH ART FOR MY SIX MEASLY SCREENS TO HANDLE.

Rasterbation and Screenprinting, Part the Second: Some Ideas Come to Delicious Fruition

AW FUCK YEAH.

Tell me this doesn't look seriously cool. I'm pretty damn pleased with it- I was going crazy trying to find a blank throw away shirt to test this screen on, but then I remembered my left over Arches 88 paper and decided to just make a quick print. It's dirty- I used fabric ink because I couldn't find my acrylic- but it's gooood. Oh so good.

I ran a couple of shirts today, now that all three new screens are touched up and functional. I used one really nice white tank with the Psyche image:

I like how the image disintegrates over the lace, I might experiment more with that on a negligee I have.

And I worked a skull in white and black (the black version is on a beat up ribbed tank, so not much love there).

PLUS I started experimenting with different parts of the octopus stencil. This is the concept I've been rolling around in my head all along, isolated the tentacles and printing them separately on different parts of clothing.

Poll: More tentacles? Perfect number of tentacles? Less tentacles? (not actually possible on this shirt, but in the foooture, maybe).

Productive weekends FTW, y'all.

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)

Stuff I Do in My Garage Part The Millionth

I printed this shirt up for a cutie traveling friend of mine who's passing through Oly at the moment, 'cuz you can't go wrong with bike gears and tearing shit down across your chest. I'm still perfecting that damn bike gear design, it keeps coming out uneven when I pull it for some reason. I've also started experimenting with printing on canvas patches, which I've discovered sucks up my screenprinting ink like a motherfucker and makes everything hella splotchy. Practice, practice, practice- if any Oly locals want a sweet patch (I'm doing everything from bike gears to anatomical hearts) and don't mind my imperfections, y'all should come keep me company in my garage while I bang them out.

Speaking of practice, I'm doing a run of patches and shirts for the Olympia Seed Exchange for their benefit this week (Thursday, 6 PM, Fertile Grounds, delicious pizza and I'll print any damn thing you want with this stencil). This is the first one, with tell tale I-forgot-to-tape-off-my-gutters mistakes, but at least now I know that the screen came out decently. My aforementioned traveling friend who I've pressed into being my sexy shop aide for the moment just cut the rest of the fabric for me, so I'm taking it out to the garage to ravage with inks.

Fishehes, parts two and three

The second part of making my fish screen, coming up with the next layer. I was thinking in terms of bubbles, and came up with a cityscape silhouette. If you look closely, and share my linguistic geekery, you'll see where I hid the cyrillic letters for fish in the buildings.

And because I was a failure at posting yesterday, here's the transparency I drew from my original ink sketch (photographing plastic- less than easy). I also burned the screen today, although the emulsion didn't harden quite enough and I wound up with a little haze trying to wash out. I made a new drying area (cardboard box with a fan propped up) but I only left it for an hour or so which I think was the problem. If I was anything less than supremely lazy, I'd walk the ten feet to my garage and throw a picture of it up, but as it is y'all can see it tomorrow when I pull the first prints.

I get a lot out of serigraphy, but every time I burn a screen I feel like there's so much more I could be doing design wise. I haven't put any of my screens to fabric yet because I don't feel like they're good enough. Luckily my technical skills are improving every time I pull together a print, and with luck by the time my designs are satisfying I'll have the ability to print them tightly.

Beauty in Madness

I HAVE PAINT PENS.

This is a transparency I just put together (see the nifty shadows?) with my new screens in mind. All my serigraphy ideas lately tend to deal with madness, probably because I'm drawing on Fly as inspiration. And y'know, crazy brain.

Emotional blackhole status: massively on edge and twitchy.