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.

I have photogenic housemates, Part the Second

Quick post before I get back to more important matters (read: drinking fauxmosas). This is a t-shirt I deconstructed fer funsies to match the skeleton print I put on the front. It's surprisingly easy to do the back design, took about five minutes total. Now that I worked out the basics of it, I'm going to start experimenting with the holes and placement. Bonus points: requires exactly no sewing, which I'm pretty incapable of anyways!

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)

Babyclothes and screenprinting idurrs

My good friend Puck recently had a child (Graciella Holly Adams- happy belated birth day, beautiful), so I printed up a some baby clothes for her before I visited them today. They came out really cleanly, which is nice because I was expected to run into some problems not being able to stretch the fabric over my shirt board. I'd like to start selling kids clothes in my etsy- my new favoritest source for screenprintable items, the Westside co-op Free Store, has them in overflowing boxes, so I'm set for raw material.

I was also planning to print out a bunch of transparencies today at Evergreen, but it's fucking labor day (although- weirdly! we're at the beginning of September, not May. SOMEthing's wrong!) so the library where my beloved photocopier lives is closed. I have IDEARS all prepped, though, so that's the plan of action tomorrow.

Bike Chain My Heart

I've been mucking around with combining images from different screens lately, mostly because I haven't had a chance to print out any new transparencies to burn. This is my favorite one from today- I tried really hard to get the bike chains to overlap just right, and it came out nicely. It's a fun artistic stretch to design by combining a limited number of elements instead of just finding more images to work with.

(This is what it looks like adorning one of my numerous photogenic housemates)

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.