Ross Churchley
A pink, purple, and blue flower screen printed onto paper.

Screen printing

Last weekend’s artistic adventure was screen printing at New Westminister’s Arrieta Art Studio!

The process starts with a sketch.

A sketch of a stylized five-petaled flower, lying on a paint-stained artist’s table.
My geometric rose (simplified version) is my go-to design for new art experiments.

We painted the sketch onto a screen with a water-soluble drawing fluid, wait for it to dry, cover the whole screen with an impermeable screen filler, and then wait for that to dry. Then we washed the drawing fluid out, leaving only the filler outlining the negative of the original design.

An embroidery hoop and a thin screen, on which the flower (now looking more like a cartoon star) is painted in a translucent blue fluid.
A closeup of the front side of the embroidery hoop, the blue flower design now surrounded by a rubbery muddy red fluid.
The hoop, held up to a light, with the flower design on the screen defined solely by the red filler covering the negative space.
A splatter of pink paint mixed on a glass pane with a plastic spoon. Mixtures of green and blue are also on the table.
The process of preparing to print.

Next it was time to mix up some paints and squeegee them through the mesh to make our prints! (Unfortunately, my hands were too messy to take pictures of this part.)

A print of a five-pointed flower or star. The colour is a marbled gradient from pink to purple to blue. The edges are messy, as though drawn in crayon, and the whole thing is outlined in a purple circular stain of paint.
A second print of the same flower or star. The colour is a marbled swirl of purple and pink.

The final results were by no means professional, but I think they have a pretty cool organic look to them.