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.
Speedball’s screen filler—this is what I use to make my screens
I tried a few techniques at home and have settled on using screen filler to make my screens, which is a red goop you paint onto the screen in the areas you don’t want to print (it’s also called “blockout”). Using a paper template as a guide, I paint the images onto the screen with screen filler and when I’m done with the image, I reclaim the screen with a power washer in my basement. This allows me to keep the screen-making process all under one roof like I wanted. It does limit what kind of imagery I can make—gone are the days of turning any drawing into a print and printing perfect, hairline-thin lines onto paper. I’m limited by my ability to paint and use a brush, which has actually been a nice change. Making screens has become a part of the process that I enjoy. I no longer have a million transparencies to organize and I have my hands in far fewer chemicals—just Greased Lightning to scrub out the screen filler.
My basement reclaim station: a power washer over a drain in my basement
For my current project, which is based on rearranged text/type pieces cut from old magazines, I make mockups on the computer, print them out, and use these templates as a guide to paint each screen/color layer of the print. For this project, I’m working on 19” x 25” sheets of paper. I have only one large screen, so I have to decide at some point I’m done with that image and reclaim it (which essentially means “wash it away forever”). Screen printing is about making multiples, and I am making multiples (small editions), but these images aren’t endlessly reproducible because there is no printed transparency to fall back on to reburn a screen. Once I wash the image away, it’s gone. It’s been a good exercise in decision-making and moving on.
An example of a screen I made at home using screen filler