Silk Printing

At the end of last term I participated in the silk printing workshop. Before this workshop I had never worked with printing on fabrics, or polychromatic monoprints (many coloured, single print). With this process we painted our designs onto the back of screens used for screen printing, using specific inks for silk printing. In a way this process in similar to water colour as there are many different techniques to put the ink on the screen. You can begin with a base colour and then proceed with your design immediately over the top, but then the design will bleed out and you will not get clear crisp lines. If you do want clear, crisp lines you must wait for each layer of ink to dry before adding another. This requires a lot of patience, and is easier on a warmer day, as you cannot use artificial heat to dry the inks (they react and discolour). The actual process of printing is very similar to that of screen printing. Once the screen is completely dry place the screen face down on the silk, (which has been attached to the backing sheet prior to printing), pour the release fluid at the top of the screen and pull it down with a squeegee. It is best to only do this once so that the ink pigments don't contaminate other parts of the design.

At the end of the workshop we ended up with one full size silk scarf and a smaller practice piece. I found this workshop really fun and it was nice to do something completely different that I wouldn't normally do.



Final design on the screen

Final printed scarf on backing sheet (the apples are on the backing sheet)