Once the development stage was complete and all materials were prepared it was time for production. Preparing the screen was a simple process as I've done this a number of times now but as ever its a time consuming job. Nevertheless I was able to stick to my planned time schedule by having the screen prepared and posters printed within two days.
I bought only two A1 Colorplan 270gsm sheets from Fred Aldous totalling £6 as I settled for quality over quantity in terms of stock, but I knew this would have its potential downfalls. With the poster being A3 I only had a number of opportunities to print the perfect poster, and as I know from screen printing in the past it takes a number of goes to get that perfect print. As I considered this a potential limitation to the production of the poster, I took time on each print to make sure each one was to a high standard.
The first stage of the process was applying the white layer first onto the stock, to help guide the layout of the poster I used the original exposure print (bottom of the image) and compared it to the first print to see if the dot elements were in the correct position. Using kodetrace was another helpful part of the process as it allowed me to test print before applying paint to the stock.
Once I completed applying the white layer the next stage was the black layer including all the type content of the poster. Compared to the last stage this one didn't go as smoothly, the first problem was simply aligning the type over the dots. Kodetrace did help but I couldn't get the perfect alignment on all prints, with some having the type slightly off the dots. The second issue was the mix of paint and binder, as I'm told the mixture is meant to mainly binder. Sadly for the first few prints I did the mixture was off, resulting in the paint drying quickly on the screen which meant the paint wasn't getting through. I quickly fixed this problem by simply adding more binder to the paint but this didn't resolve the next small difficulty in production. When applying one layer of black paint over the white layer, the dots were still showing underneath on a number of prints. It wasn't until a small crit after production when one peer suggested I should have just simply done another layer of black again to fix the problem.
The final stage in the printing process was applying the gloss over the display type, I purchased gloss paste which Mike recommended to use but he warned to be careful as the paste dries extremely quick. I quickly noticed this as the paste would dry after one use and then block the screen for the next print. Another difficulty of using gloss paste was aligning it with the display type, using kodetrace is almost obsolete for applying gloss paste as you barely see the paste once its applied to kodetrace stock. Therefore I had to guess the layout then quickly apply the gloss before it dried out. Luckily most of the guesswork actually paid off as the gloss was applied directly on top of the display type to create a nice shine and add depth of field.
Now that I completed all the stages and had my final prints, Mike from the print room and Dan from Goat Collective had a look at the work and we assessed the prints. Dan who is a graphic design alumni who specialises in screenprinting was the peer who recommended to simply go over the black layer again, but he also suggested another point in the feedback. He thought that maybe the gloss applied over the dots would work better but once I explained the reasoning for glossing the display type he understood and commented that it would give the print more of a 'pop'. Mike selected which prints he thought were the strongest in terms of quality and recommended me to go over the type in a ink pen and through this you wouldn't know the difference if its done properly.
Following Mikes feedback I then went over certain aspects of the prints which paint dint fully get to, with a ink pen. It can be described as a botch job but I asked a number of peers if they noticed and they were oblivious to the ink pen addition.
No comments:
Post a Comment