What is silk-screening?

First of all, I consider myself a printmaker, not a painter, so I think a little differently when I am creating a print. I do not do an original painting, for me the printing process is the "painting" if you will.

How is silk-screening done? There are many different ways to silk-screen, but the one thing all techniques have in common is a Silk Screen. This is a wooden or metal frame stretched with a porous fabric of some kind; silk used to be the most common fabric used, but modern technology has made synthetic fabrics more durable, stable, and cheaper, so silk is rarely used anymore.

Step 1. I begin with a pencil drawing that I call the master. It is usually a very clear drawing where I have outlined all the shapes in the print, and I have worked out all the colors that will be in the print.

Step 2. Each color in the print must be printed separately, and requires a separate drawing. So I must draw by hand all the separations.

Step 3. I then expose the drawings or color separations with a light sensitive film to produce a stencil which is then adhered to the back of a blank silk screen. When the stencil is dry, I am ready to begin printing.

Step 4. I hinge the screen to a set of hinge clamps attached to my printing table so the screen will stay in the same place each time I raise and lower it.

Step 5. I align the color I wish to print under the screen and place registration marks along one side of the master drawing, usually the longest side, and the bottom corner. This is called registering. I then place a blank sheet of paper under the screen against the registration marks that I have placed on the table. Each sheet of paper will be placed in the same spot.

Step 6. I then begin printing. I drizzle some ink at the top of the screen and using a squeegee I press the ink through the open areas of the screen onto the paper underneath. I do this by grabbing some ink with the squeegee and pulling it toward me at an angle. This requires using some pressure to force the ink through the open areas of the screen. A squeegee is a rubber blade attached to a wooden handle.

Step 7. I lift the screen up, which is hinged on one side so it will remain in place, and hand the paper to my husband, who then places the paper with wet ink on it all over my studio.

Step 8. I repeat this printing process until I have printed the entire stack of paper with the color I am printing.

Step 9. I then clean the screen and squeegee with a solvent cleaner to remove the ink, it is then ready to be washed with soap and water to remove the stencil, which is water soluble.

Step 10. This entire process is then repeated for the entire stack of paper, and must be done for every color in the print. If I wish to print several shades of blue, for instance, I must print each one separately. The only time I print several colors at one time is when I print what I call multi-color skies or water. To do this I put several blobs of color on the screen at one time, and when they are pulled together they blend on the screen and create interesting patterns. No two are the same.

Step 11. I normally keep my edition sizes to about 100. This is a manageable size for me, as the actual printing process is physically tiring. Imagine yourself standing in one place for 1 to 2 hours per color, repeatedly raising and lowering a screen and pulling a squeegee. After 4 to 5 hours of this my body aches. I usually try to print 2 and sometimes 3 colors in an evening. I spend my days drawing color separations, preparing screens and mixing inks. Then when my husband is home in the evenings, we print usually until late at night.

Step 12. When the print is finished, I sort through the edition and reject the ones with imperfections. Counting the remaining good prints determines the edition size. So while I aim for 100, I rarely get a nice round number of good prints to be signed and numbered. I then pick the very best and sign them first. In the case of a multi-color sky or water, it is usually the ones I like the best that get signed first. There is no real difference in quality from print number 1 to 100 in silk-screening, as there is sometimes in other printing mediums such as etching, where the plate will wear down after a while. Although the stencils I use will eventually break down, you would need to print several hundred to begin noticing that.

I hand print all my serigraphs, and with anything hand made, tiny imperfections are unavoidable, and part of the beauty of the process.