While teaching a Youth Arts Alliance screen printing class this summer, I ran into two problems: one, the students really wanted to print t-shirts, but I hadn’t planned for that in the curriculum. I don’t have a t-shirt press and generally don’t (like to) print t-shirts anymore. The other problem was, what would we print? There were 8 students in the class, and it wasn’t going to be possible for everyone to print their own design.
The t-shirt press problem ended up being the easier of the two to figure out. I did some googling and found instructions on how to build a simple one-color t-shirt press. I had enough scrap wood and extra hinges lying around that I didn’t have to buy anything, and my friends at Ocelot Print Shop let me borrow a platen they had lying around (the platen is the part that holds the t-shirt while you’re printing it).
Super scrappy t-shirt press: start with a long board that gets clamped to the table, and then attach a platen (or something like it) and a smaller piece of wood to hold the hinges.
Scrappy t-shirt press in action!
The “what will we print?” problem was trickier to figure out. How do we collaborate as a group to make one design? I talked to my super-talented artist-friend Susie about it, and we came up with having the students do an exquisite corpse exercise and then combine the figures into one image. If you don’t know what an exquisite corpse is by name, you’ve probably seen one somewhere. It’s a collaborative drawing game invented by the Surrealists, where participants draw on different sections of folded paper without knowing what was drawn before it.
In the class, we sat in a circle and folded our papers into thirds, with only the top third visible. We all drew heads, and then flipped the paper to the middle section and passed it to the person on the left. Then we all drew torsos, flipped to the last folded section and passed it to the left. We all drew legs and feet and ended up with a group of absurd figures:
The super buff guy with four-pack abs and duck feet is my favorite.
I scanned the figures and digitally combined them into one image, sent the image to Ocelot Print Shop and they burned a screen for me. We printed the t-shirts in the next session of the class, and the youth seemed to enjoy the t-shirt printing process. I’ll have to consider adding t-shirt printing to classes in the future — even though I personally don’t like it that much, it has more popular appeal than perhaps printing on paper does.
