This week we attempted a two-colour print, of a design I drew on the iPad. We realized that the free program wasn’t high enough resolution. We tried a couple other free ones before taking everyone’s advice and buying Procreate.
My wife used Procreate to clean up the design and divide it into two layers for the two colours. We printed them onto white paper and made sure they lined up by holding them up to the light. They didn’t quite seem to (just a hair off), and it was 1am, so we tried editing it on preview instead of the iPad (1st mistake). That seemed to work so we printed them onto the inkjet printer plastic. We had to print two copies of each layer, in order to make them dark enough.
We exposed them both onto one screen (110 mesh), since we hadn’t had a chance to set another one because of a family emergency last week. We exposed them for 12 minutes, at the 3rd notch from the top, and they washed out quite easily and successfully.
Then came the printing part, which was a bit of a gong show. We have decided we must be missing something because we were not able to line them up successfully with any sort of system that would work for more than a singular print (if that). We tried numerous attempts…
We tried to line it up using the bulleyes, looking through the screen. This worked kind of, until we flooded the screen and then we couldn’t see through to try and line up the next one. We had used news print as the trial though, so we couldn’t register it correctly, and couldn’t see through, so we cleaned out the screen to try again.
We cut a bunch of news print to the exact size of the paper (as close as we could). We found centre lines, edge lines, top lines, re-registered with bullseyes, and put registration tabs on the vacuum table. And again, no luck. We tried taping off parts of the red design (thinking back to the edits we made on preview instead of Procreate), but no luck.
We recognize that this design is pretty tight, but our margin of error is moving around from 1/16 of an inch to a 1/4 inch. We also tried registering using a plastic layer (something that Hjalmer had tried before), but this didn’t work either. We watched YouTube videos, re-watched old classes from Screen the World, “ruined” a pile of paper, through some paper at the window… no luck.
red print with black plastic printed sheet this is a red print with the black printed plastic on top – you can see a little red coming through on the bottom.
Tape to fix the little red peeking through in photo above Centering the design on the paper
This was a side issue – it was starting to bleed and eventually the only thing that seemed to fix it was to not flood the screen
This one looks pretty good – 1/20 that more of less worked. Looking forward to hearing some feedback and hopefully it’s not just make the design simpler.
Not sure how to contact you but wanted to make sure you saw this funding 💫