Suprising Fine Detail

I worked on a design a while ago with the intention of screen printing so  all I had to do was tidy it up, size it properly, convert grays to a shading technique (I used 50% threshold for black versus white), and then print the film.

I could not find anywhere to get the film printed on the weekend as I don’t own a printer.  Neighbours don’t have a printer either and then I tried the big box stores.  Both Staples and then Walmart turned me away and were actually a bit rude and condescending stating that their printers only can print on their paper … my next guess on printing film with public services would be to try the library or a local print store which will be open in the week.  I’m likely just going to get it printed at Wachiay this week.

 

So all I exposed and printed was the test film.  I used 11 minutes and am very impressed with the results. Some areas that did not turn out was the 90% region (which appears as solid black) and some of the finer text.

I wet the screen before adding the ink to reduce the chances of the stencil filling in.  I may have used too much spray as it took about 5 prints for the ink to become crisp. This is the first, and worst print as I’m clearing out the water from the screen.

 

This is my progression (I used scrap paper from a printer for the first half of prints).

 

Here is a close up on one of my best prints  (the problem areas are the same across the best ones).

Some of the problem areas include the very fine text and the 90% region, both of which I was able to identify in the screen.  One big surprise after printing was the 50% region – the amount of ink that made it through looks almost black on the right side and near white on the left.  Inspecting the screen afterwards, it can be seen that the whiter areas did not fully expose (or maybe my washout was not strong enough). The other very interesting part is how some of the fine detail showed up but other parts did not when it was all exposed to the same amount of light – I wonder if bringing the light a bit farther away would make it more uniform.

Overall, I am very impressed with what I was able to expose and print. In some locations, you could read the print as 6 points! Moving forward with my designs, I think I’ll stick to the safe side and use 12 point print.