Blog 6

 

One of the most crucial steps in screen printing is burning the screen itself. Without having a stencil to print on, you literally cannot print anything. However, this is one of the most finicky parts of the process, and a lot can get messed up and it takes time to get right. 

The first step is to make sure that you have an empty screen with no designs on it. Empty screens are kept in a drawer, but you can always power wash the designs off of an existing screen to have a blank one. The most important step of this process is to make sure that after you take a screen out of the drawer, or after it dries from being power washed, that the screen is not exposed to any light whatsoever. This is important because if a blank screen is exposed to light, anywhere the light touches will burn the screen, creating a purple layer. However, this is also how we burn designs into the stencil itself. In our mentor’s studio, he has a machine that creates a vacuum seal around the screen and uses LED light to burn designs. In order to actually put the designs on there, and this is one of the more frustrating parts, we have to use transparent cut outs of designs and carefully place them onto the screen so they are mirrored and not actually facing our orientation. This step is frustrating because we have to do all of this in the dark, so we can’t really see if we mess up or not. The final step is putting the screen with the designs taped on into the machine, and then the machine burns everything around the transparent sheets, creating a stencil we can use for printing.

This entire process is the core of screen printing, but also one of the trickiest to get right.

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