ok another 6 months has passed. i never added the pictures i said i was going to add. i needed to collect them all into a folder or something. i hate aggregating things after the fact. anyway, screenprinting has been going awesome. i've gotten to show lots of friends how to do it. i've messed around with some fancier screens. i even had a beautiful 305 count screen and she was gorgeous. maybe i'll put a picture. i was borrowing a friend's power washer for screen reclaiming, and i just washed too close to the sun. tore a hole right down the left side. i've done a couple of multicolor prints, although only one legitimately required separating the channels. it was of the north carolina license plate, which i liked. i'm still really interested in text, and geometric, fine-lined designs. i've tried doing a couple prints of photos to mixed results. if i decide to invest further, i think i'd probably get a nicer printer that can handle bigger designs. but yeah, the social aspect of it has been great. i love teaching my friends something and they all seem pretty happy with how theirs turn out. next things to work on are: printing on black shirts, continuing to work on halftones, and more multicolor prints. i also should figure out how to use that giant press i bought. doing this all manually is fun for one-offs but if i wanna make several of a shirt, some degree of consistency across prints would be useful. will be out of town for a while, but hopefully i'll at least keep designing during that time. my photoshop is still completely amateur, but i am slowly becoming more acquainted. ------- peace and love, tjc
it has been about a bit under two months since i wrote on here, but i have been doing lots of screenprinting! i've made some shirts for different events i've gone to (dead&co, outsidelands), and some silly ones for myself and friends. i think it's pretty safe to say i have a decent grasp on the basic one-color flow, although i am a bit constrained by the fact that i am working in my apartment with minimal equipment. one downside to this is it's difficult to reclaim my screens without a pressure washer. i did recently invest in a 4-station press but i've yet to do any multi-color prints, so that's the next big step. i've been thinking about making 10-20 shirts of some basic design and seeing if i could sell them at dolores park or something, so maybe the next post will give an update on how that went. until next time (i will add some pictures to this post, soon) tjc
this was my second attempt a few days later on june 26, 2025. i tested my hypotheses from my first run and used way less emulsion and exposed the screen a bit more precisely (who knew following instructions would help?) anyways, this try was way more successful, although still not without user error as i exposed the image mirrored o_O. not pictured here but i also messed around with mixing two inks (blue+red) and it came out nicely. while not perfect, i think this was a big step in the right direction. next i want to try a more complex image with less margin of error compared to plain text. tjc
this was my first attempt on june 22, 2025. i wanted to just print my address onto a shirt as a test run, but obviously i ended up with some sorta failed MoMA exhibit. in terms of what went wrong- i'm pretty sure i used far too much emulsion, which didn't dry at all. i also think i didn't expose the image long enough under the UV, resulting in essentially everything washing out. honestly, i was just happy seeing ink on the shirt, and it gave me a good excuse to practice reclaiming the screen which went pretty well as far as i could tell. tjc