As it turns out trial and error are the best ways to learn, though recently my errors have been out weighing the learning experience!
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| Exposing the Screen by Jo Howell 2011 |
I have been experimenting with taking my photographic work into screen printing using light sensitive emulsion, and just like many times before in the dark room it is taking me a while to get to grips with the exposure times. I am now on my third attempt to get this screen to the desired level required for the print. The first screen I tried I had thoroughly under exposed the image and all of the emulsion washed out!
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| The Screen bed by Jo Howell 2011 |
The second attempt which you can see in the image above was exposed nearly to the correct level but when the emulsion was drying in the light tight drawer it had slipped from the supports that stopped it from sticking to the newspaper, as you can see there were some bits I just couldn't get off! But rather than be upset by the problem I simply made a note to be more careful next time and made a normal print, and a ghost print anyway. (See below for ghost print version.)
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| Embrace the Mistake by Jo Howell 2011 |
I had also decided to add some more lines and colour using pens with water to blur the edges. I actually quite like the result but prepared a screen to be exposed the next day. Today I exposed the screen I had prepared and was fairly happy with the exposure though I had noticed that the areas that had worked the best were the areas where my acetate positives overlapped, which indicated to me that I would probably get much more defined edges if I doubled up the printed acetate images (to let less light through the printed areas).
This was today's screen (below) that I then ruined with impatience by rubbing the screen when it wasn't quite dry! So hopefully next week I will have managed to create a screen print from my photographs that meets my lofty expectations...
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| Screen held up to light by Jo Howell |
It hasn't all been bad though, in between screen preparations, drying times, and general waiting about, I have also been working more on my "Onion" self portrait series of mixed media paintings. Based on
Carol Anne Duffy's poem Valentine the work explores notions of self and layers that are hiding or obscuring the true view. I chose this poem as inspiration because of it's metaphorical use of the onion in place of a heart. Just like the Onion and the poem have many layers so do the paintings. I have finished 3 to date, with an image of one of the paintings being referenced in the screen printing process above.
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| 3 Stages of Onion layer 3 Painting by Jo Howell 2011 |
I have also included an image of the nearly complete Onion layer 2 painting so that you can see what I mean about referencing it in the screen printing process.
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| Onion Layer 2 painting by Jo Howell |
Right, sorry if I bored you with all of that! Hopefully the next round of experimentation may go a little smoother with more interesting things to show you. Keep following me on
Facebook for regular updates and if you want to contact me you can find my details on my
website. Thanks for reading!
