Screeny Goodness!

I'm on Day Two of my five-day silk screen crash course, and I am loving it. I really think I may have found a new hobby/obsession. I joked with my classmates about live-blogging the class, but even though I'm there most of the day, there's no way I'd have time to blog. I've been too busy learning and doing and having serious fun.

Yesterday we learned some basics about silk screening - different methods, selecting art, understanding the tools, etc. We learned how to build our own silk screens, which is loads of fun. We went to town with the staple guns and have been duct taping like crazy. It's a little tedious, but also very satisfying.

One thing that's been interesting is how much silk screening is like sewing in terms of prep time. Sometimes folks think of sewing and think of just being at a machine whipping up a garment. In actuality, though, you spend most of your time measuring, marking, basting, prepping, and pressing. The time spent at the machine is actually a really small part of it. I've found the same is true of silk screening. We've spent a lot of time prepping, stapling, stretching, taping, drawing, slicing stencils, choosing images, painting screens, etc. Today, in the last 15 minutes of class, we finally made our first rough prints. I love it, though. Every step of the process is highly enjoyable.

We made stencils yesterday I had a great book with me that my friend, Bella, loaned me more than a year ago. I ended up finding perfect stencil templates in it, and after some playing around on the photo copier, I made a little scene for my first stencil. When we had our chance to print this afternoon, I was very excited ... and a little nervous. With Kat's gentle instruction, though, my first prints went off with out a hitch. It was such an awesome feeling! I love making stuff - and learning new things! This is like Dream Week for me. I already have ideas for what I'm going to do with these first few prints. It's hard to tell in the picture, but the prints are actually in gold paint.

Tomorrow we start talking about photo emulsion screens and we'll finish painting our other screens (or at least I will ... everyone else finished those today, I was a bit of a slow poke. Can you tell what image I'm creating up on that top screen up there?). We'll even get to do something with wax, which is always fun.


For now, I have to sign off. I still have a screen to tape tonight! Stay tuned for more silk screen updates!