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Oct. 25th, 2006 04:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kirkcudbrightFor better or worse, the graphic design assignment is Done, and has only to be presented tomorrow night.
I originally thought I'd be tracing this all out in Illustrator, but it quickly became apparent that it would be easier, and nicer/messier, in Photoshop.
I started with a little gif of a 10-foot U-Haul truck, scaled it up, tightened and smoothed the lines, and did a little manual touch-up. Kermit is from a still from one of the movies, cropped and extracted, and processed with the Stamp filter. Add some text, and copy the whole thing onto transparency. That's the easy part, and the end of the digital part.
We use a photo-transfer method to make the screen. First coat the screen with photo-sensitive emulsion, and let it dry in a dark room, or inside a cardboard box, or both. If the emulsion is allowed to contact the box, it will stick to the cardboard when it dries, and you'll have to scrub out the emulsion, and start over. Hypothetically.
When it's dry, put the transparency with the design on the photo-sensitized screen, add a sheet of glass to keep it flat, and set it under a 150 watt light for 45 minutes. The emulsion that's exposed to the light will harden, while the emulsion under the black area of the transparency will remain soft, and can be washed out, with a little light scrubbing from a toothbrush. However, if the reflector concentrates the light in the center of the image, it can get overexposed, even under the black part of the transparency, and it can be an unholy bitch to clear out that part of the screen. You might have to delicately paint the lines with bleach, scrub, curse, scrub again, and ultimately scrape with a sharp knife, gently but not quite gently enough, so that the fabric starts to separate, and the screen will not be re-usable for future projects. Hypothetically.
When the screen is dry, squeegee ink across it to "pre-load" the screen, then squeegee it onto the fabric. It's somewhat of an art to figure out how much ink to use, how much pressure to use, etc. I still haven't figured it out. To change ink colors, you have to wash and dry the screen, naturally. I did a total of 6 shirts (including a scratch monkey) in 4 different colors. I did mix a custom color, but I didn't get adventurous with multiple colors on the same screen.
Mounting the shirts for presentation kept me up until quarter past late, and involved a large cardbaord furniture box (the box being cardboard, not the furniture), folded to resemble a room divider, with big "tabs" to put the shirts over. It ain't pretty, none of it's pretty, but all the same I've got a yen to do more of it.
I originally thought I'd be tracing this all out in Illustrator, but it quickly became apparent that it would be easier, and nicer/messier, in Photoshop.
I started with a little gif of a 10-foot U-Haul truck, scaled it up, tightened and smoothed the lines, and did a little manual touch-up. Kermit is from a still from one of the movies, cropped and extracted, and processed with the Stamp filter. Add some text, and copy the whole thing onto transparency. That's the easy part, and the end of the digital part.
We use a photo-transfer method to make the screen. First coat the screen with photo-sensitive emulsion, and let it dry in a dark room, or inside a cardboard box, or both. If the emulsion is allowed to contact the box, it will stick to the cardboard when it dries, and you'll have to scrub out the emulsion, and start over. Hypothetically.
When it's dry, put the transparency with the design on the photo-sensitized screen, add a sheet of glass to keep it flat, and set it under a 150 watt light for 45 minutes. The emulsion that's exposed to the light will harden, while the emulsion under the black area of the transparency will remain soft, and can be washed out, with a little light scrubbing from a toothbrush. However, if the reflector concentrates the light in the center of the image, it can get overexposed, even under the black part of the transparency, and it can be an unholy bitch to clear out that part of the screen. You might have to delicately paint the lines with bleach, scrub, curse, scrub again, and ultimately scrape with a sharp knife, gently but not quite gently enough, so that the fabric starts to separate, and the screen will not be re-usable for future projects. Hypothetically.
When the screen is dry, squeegee ink across it to "pre-load" the screen, then squeegee it onto the fabric. It's somewhat of an art to figure out how much ink to use, how much pressure to use, etc. I still haven't figured it out. To change ink colors, you have to wash and dry the screen, naturally. I did a total of 6 shirts (including a scratch monkey) in 4 different colors. I did mix a custom color, but I didn't get adventurous with multiple colors on the same screen.
Mounting the shirts for presentation kept me up until quarter past late, and involved a large cardbaord furniture box (the box being cardboard, not the furniture), folded to resemble a room divider, with big "tabs" to put the shirts over. It ain't pretty, none of it's pretty, but all the same I've got a yen to do more of it.
silk screen printing
Date: 2006-10-26 12:31 pm (UTC)Dan of the five toes