You only have one screen and you want to make a new print! Or you’re teaching a basic screen printing class and you want to keep it simple! But in either case, you want it to be more interesting! I have a fun tip for you!
Have you tried painting in the screen? Did you know you can do that? You can! I totally forgot about this technique until recently, when I was planning out a new beginner screen printing workshop that I’ll start teaching this fall. I wanted to keep the workshop short and simple, with the limitation of one screen only. One screen means one color, right? Not always! You can split fountain/rainbow roll, you can drizzle (a technique I’ll describe another time, but it’s more or less what it sounds like), and you can paint in the screen.
A still from a video of me painting a screen — scroll down for video!
It’s as easy as it sounds — you grab a brush and some screen printing ink and paint the screen in the areas you want to be that color. You can paint as many colors as you want. Then you flood the screen with another color and print! Technically each print in this edition is a monoprint because they are all a little different from each other.
A one-color image printed in one color (right) and printed with yellow ink painted in the “halo” in the rest of the prints.
Another one-color image printed in one color (right) and printed with hot red ink painted in the background of the rest of the prints.
I made a video to demonstrate:
I’m excited to use this technique in a future print!