Power of the Press Fest was on Sunday, and it was a really great event. I displayed my prints and talked to people about them. I wasn’t feeling ready to sell them and haven’t been in a “selling things” headspace, and people seemed to understand.

As promised, here is a process video demonstrating how I make my screens at home these days using screen filler. This is the first video I’ve made in an editing sense, and it was really fun to make! I used my trusty old (OLD) Nikon D90 camera to shoot the photos and video. I bought my D90 camera in 2009 and it still works great.

Over the weekend, I prepared the first screen of my next print and shot some photos and video to make a process video . . . which I don’t know how to do (yet), so stay tuned for that! While making the screen, I learned something valuable: if your screen filler is chunky, let it go and move on. I had been using the same, somewhat-old screen filler for a few years because I like to use everything up until it dies, but it was chunky and really difficult to paint with.

I’ve been screen printing for twenty years and have dabbled in a lot of different screen-making techniques: emulsion + darkroom; contact paper; screen filler (with and without its partner, drawing fluid); tape; paper cutouts. When you make a screen, you are essentially creating a stencil—some areas will print (ink will go through) and other areas won’t. In my time as a screen printer, I had gotten used to convenient darkroom access for various reasons and situations, but that became tricky during the pandemic. Last fall I moved my screen printing studio into an extra bedroom in my home, and as I thought about my printing future, I decided to challenge myself: for my next print project (whatever it would be), I would keep the entire process under one (my) roof.

At the start of the pandemic, I turned to collage as a simple way to make art at home with materials I had lying around: magazines, glue, scissors. When I started collaging, I gave myself two rules: no humans and no text were allowed in the images.