Screenprinting - The Big Draw

My first screenprint : "Untitled"

Thanks to the national arts project "The Big Draw" which aims to get everyone drawing I got a chance to try my hand at screen printing in a workshop held at The Tolbooth, Stirling .

Our tutor, Andrew Mackenzie managed in three hours to give us an intensive introduction to the process which ended up with us all walking away with several screen prints each! quite an achievement!

We used the current exhibition of Aladsair Gray's prints as source material. After an introduction and brief history of screen printing we were taken to the exhibition and given quarter of an hour to draw an image from which we would later develope a stencil for screen printing.

I must admit that I entered the workshop feeling a bit sceptical: how on earth could be do a screen print from scratch in such a short time? Andrew proved me wrong. I m now an enthusiast of screen printing and want to find out more.

Glasgow Print Studio

Have started to prepare work for my exhibition next February and the first piece of work I want to complete is some digital prints on Japanese paper.

Well, I went into Glasgow Print studio to discuss whether it would be possible to do this on their new printer.

"No way!" says the director standing in the middle of his state-of-the-art new printing premises.
"That machine cost us £6,000".

OK he has a point so its back home to fiddle with my own printer and try to work out why some prints are coming out so heavily inked as to be unusable.

Well, I guess it is just another hurdle that those of us working with new media face weekly if not daily. Unlike making traditional art we can't ring up a friend or seek out expert advice on how to solve these problems, because nobody has ever done it before. It is a case that we all have to work it out as we go along.