Screen Printing
Screen printing involves pushing ink through a mesh silkscreen to create the image on the paper underneath. To create the desired print, the image is placed on the screen using a light sensitive coating that once hardened by UV will block out what ink is not intended to go through onto the final image.
CMYK is a technical process that involves breaking down your image in photoshop to its basic primary colors and printing those layers onto transparencies. Each color layer gets its own screen and the color layers are then printed on top of each other one at a time to reassemble the full color graded image. Essentially, the image is deconstructed in photoshop and then put back together with the physical printing process to make multiple photo quality renditions of the original image. It is the manual process of what a modern printer does. The process is very tedious and requires a great deal of accuracy.
In the project of the hot air balloon (above), I experimented with the different color layers and expanded the process beyond it’s technical application. This is one way in which I went beyond the practical purposes of printmaking to create an abstract piece.
The butterflies bellow were made with the CMYK process as well.
This print (on the left) was made with a series of hand drawn transparencies. Once I completed printing the intended prints I used the layers of the print to create abstract monoprints (on the right).
