More screen printing babble
May. 12th, 2006 01:51 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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craftgrrlScreening == Stenciling's Platonic Idealized Form
A layman's essay on what the heck silk screening/screen printing/serigraphy is and how it works
To soothe your terror at this otherwise text-only post:
My first screen printed design, mostly aimed at my school's Classics Club and fellow suffering Latin scholars.
The text is pretty darn small (the bottle cap is there for scale), so I had to use photo-emulsion to get the details, therefore this was NOT printed with this tutorial.
The text across the top is what SPQR actually stands for: "The Senate and Roman People" and the text at the bottom is Italian for "these Romans are crazy" also conveniently abbreviated as SPQR.
Let's say you're faced with this scenario: you want to put an image of a tennis racquet on to a t-shirt. You have several options, but I will only address screening, and stenciling as it applies to the concept of serigraphy.
Stenciling is the use of a resist to prevent one medium from touching another-- in this case the resist will prevent paint from touching the t-shirt. You can use lots of things as the resist, like wax-paper or other masking material. The stencil is in the inverse of the design you want, since the areas that exist on the stencil are going to be the areas where paint WON'T be.
So with your tennis racquet, you have a problem-- the design includes a grid, which means the stencil for that area is going to be a bunch of rectangles that aren't connected to each other. You could carefully place each rectangle of masking material on the t-shirt and hope that the application of paint won't move them. But what about removing the stencil, or what if you want to make a second t-shirt? You're out of luck. You'd have to connect each island of resist to each other and make the entire design continuous. With some designs you can do that with a little finesse (like stencil fonts that bridge the insides of letters like "O"s to the outside), but with some that's just not feasible.
If it were just a question of getting the pieces of the stencil to stay together, you could stick them all to a piece of glass. But that would only hold them together while letting light through, not paint through.
So, replace the glass with some mesh.
What if you had a mesh screen that was coarse enough to let paint go through easily, but fine enough that you could stick all the pieces of the stencil on to it? (If you took a chicken wire fence and tried to stick the tennis racquet design on to it, most of the tiny little rectangles wouldn't be on the mesh at all, but if you took a sheet of plastic where all the rectangles had enough surface area to stick securely, no paint could permeate. Therefore, be like Goldilocks; pick the mesh that's just right.)
Ta da. You have now invented screen printing.
Refining the process:
Instead of using wax paper as your stencil material, you use a liquid that will dry to block ink. Apply this to the areas of the screen that you want blocked from ink flow. When the stuff dries, you now have a stencil on steroids.
And the paint:
The "official" serigraphy process actually involves a screen that is fine enough that paint won't go through the mesh unless something is pushing the paint through actively. This is usually accomplished by a squeegee that's scraped across the mesh, but with the glue-and-embroidery-hoop method this can be done by hand, a sponge or a brush. You dab the paint on to the screen and give it a push.
Things can get more complicated if you want to go further:
Positive versus negative screen design
Photo-emulsion (which is often like screen-printing in a recursive form! (Bonus points to anyone who understands that..))
Llamas.
Aside: Any Classics fans/people who study Latin or Italian out there?
Do you think this design would have any demand if I printed them for people outside of my immediate friends?
A layman's essay on what the heck silk screening/screen printing/serigraphy is and how it works
To soothe your terror at this otherwise text-only post:
My first screen printed design, mostly aimed at my school's Classics Club and fellow suffering Latin scholars.
The text is pretty darn small (the bottle cap is there for scale), so I had to use photo-emulsion to get the details, therefore this was NOT printed with this tutorial.
The text across the top is what SPQR actually stands for: "The Senate and Roman People" and the text at the bottom is Italian for "these Romans are crazy" also conveniently abbreviated as SPQR.
Let's say you're faced with this scenario: you want to put an image of a tennis racquet on to a t-shirt. You have several options, but I will only address screening, and stenciling as it applies to the concept of serigraphy.
Stenciling is the use of a resist to prevent one medium from touching another-- in this case the resist will prevent paint from touching the t-shirt. You can use lots of things as the resist, like wax-paper or other masking material. The stencil is in the inverse of the design you want, since the areas that exist on the stencil are going to be the areas where paint WON'T be.
So with your tennis racquet, you have a problem-- the design includes a grid, which means the stencil for that area is going to be a bunch of rectangles that aren't connected to each other. You could carefully place each rectangle of masking material on the t-shirt and hope that the application of paint won't move them. But what about removing the stencil, or what if you want to make a second t-shirt? You're out of luck. You'd have to connect each island of resist to each other and make the entire design continuous. With some designs you can do that with a little finesse (like stencil fonts that bridge the insides of letters like "O"s to the outside), but with some that's just not feasible.
If it were just a question of getting the pieces of the stencil to stay together, you could stick them all to a piece of glass. But that would only hold them together while letting light through, not paint through.
So, replace the glass with some mesh.
What if you had a mesh screen that was coarse enough to let paint go through easily, but fine enough that you could stick all the pieces of the stencil on to it? (If you took a chicken wire fence and tried to stick the tennis racquet design on to it, most of the tiny little rectangles wouldn't be on the mesh at all, but if you took a sheet of plastic where all the rectangles had enough surface area to stick securely, no paint could permeate. Therefore, be like Goldilocks; pick the mesh that's just right.)
Ta da. You have now invented screen printing.
Refining the process:
Instead of using wax paper as your stencil material, you use a liquid that will dry to block ink. Apply this to the areas of the screen that you want blocked from ink flow. When the stuff dries, you now have a stencil on steroids.
And the paint:
The "official" serigraphy process actually involves a screen that is fine enough that paint won't go through the mesh unless something is pushing the paint through actively. This is usually accomplished by a squeegee that's scraped across the mesh, but with the glue-and-embroidery-hoop method this can be done by hand, a sponge or a brush. You dab the paint on to the screen and give it a push.
Things can get more complicated if you want to go further:
Positive versus negative screen design
Photo-emulsion (which is often like screen-printing in a recursive form! (Bonus points to anyone who understands that..))
Llamas.
Aside: Any Classics fans/people who study Latin or Italian out there?
Do you think this design would have any demand if I printed them for people outside of my immediate friends?
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