Experiment: Screen-printing

Screen-printing is a very interesting process. Before this year, the only printmaking I had done was relief (woodblock), which I loved. While similar, relief and screen-printing are different enough that I am excited to explore them further. For example, in relief, the bulk of your time is spent on carving your wood to create what is basically a stamp. Then you ink up, zip zip, and you're printing. For screen-printing, the physical act of printing takes the longest. This is because you usually do many layers. You're able to have much more flexibility with your prints, changing up the colors and design on the fly. Relief prints are often a single color, and doing multiple colors on the same print is difficult (maybe that's just me, being inexperienced in it). Screen-prints are almost expected to be at least three colors and are often many more.

Here's my sketch for my next screen-print. (I may or may not post pictures relating to my first group of prints. It was, shall we say, a learning experience.)

The first print was also of the sky, so I wanted to continue with that. I'm fascinated with the sky, even attempting to do a daily sky-photographing a while back (didn't end up panning out). The moon has always been an aspect of the sky I love. So this print will be the moon on a grey (probably not that shade) background, with black markings around the edges. Yes, they will be graphic and choppy as I have sketched them. There will be four variations, with the moon rising across the sky and growing from crescent to full. To mimic the markings on the real moon, there will be a faint picture of a goddess-like figure behind everything else. As the moon travels across the prints, it will reveal a little bit more of the figure, as I attempted to depict in the top-right corner.

The edges of the print will not be straight, flat edges. They will be jagged, rough, to correspond with the graphic mark-making of the black. The effect was achieved on the screen by using a pressure washer to take out the red block-out around the edges from a pre-existing composition. I'm excited to see if they will work as well as I imagine they will.

Moon goddess, eh? I guess Sailor Moon will never really stop influencing me.  (Although, in my defense, I liked the moon before I got into Sailor Moon, so there.)