Silkscreen printing workshop I

Hey folks,

Today I attended a silkscreen printing workshop conducted by Joe of Monster Gallery. I had attended a workshop conducted by Joe before so I know his style of teaching which is pretty cool.

The workshop was conducted in a shophouse at a location I'm not familiar with. The buildings look interesting like from a different period.

It was full house. There was a kid too.

This is what the the walls look like. I was quite unnerved by Steve Job's stare as I sat opposite "him".

This workshop has 2 sessions. Today's session is about printing from stencils. Next week I get to print on fabric!!!

First we had to draw what we wanted to print. I must admit I came quite unprepared so I drew the last thing I had drawn which is my dating bird. For this print I'm using 2 colours so I need a white and a dark background.

Then we had to use a marker to trace the drawing. I used 2 stencils because I'm using 2 colours. The first stencil I drew the lighter shape and for this stencil I drew the outlines for the darker colours. Hey, can you see my shadow in the pic?

Here's my mesh with my cut out stencils. I really thought cutting out the stencils was the hard part. (I was terrified of cutting myself) It wasn't because it all went downhill from here on.

I discovered I'm really bad at pulling the colour. You use a squeegee to pull the colour down over the stencil. Sounds easy enough? Well, my first one was not too bad, maybe a bit too much ink. But a guy damaged it so I had to make another one. The thing about mesh is once the ink dries on it, your subsequent inking won't look so good. So I made a few more and all sucked.

Finally I decided I would just go and do the 2nd colour. I had to clean the mesh and stencil before using it again. Meanwhile the first colour had to dry. Mine took forever to dry on account of my liberal dose of ink.

This was my worst effort. Let's call it Mutant Bird. Joe said I pull the squeegee too fast.

This one had way too much ink and I didn't even get the whole feet. Plus I dripped water on the ink. Let's call it Disappearing Bird. Like in Back to the future when Marty McFly's parents almost rewrote history when they did not fall in love.

Another valiant attempt. I got the feet this time but butchered the beak and the tail. I felt so sad. Let's call it Broken Tail Bird.

And then I ran out of the yellow bodies. So I pulled the blue on a blank paper and I think this is my best attempt. Let's call it Invisible Blue Bird. I realised  that I had been holding the squeegee too high all these while. If I have another go, I'll probably be able to get a better result.

It was quite a fun afternoon for me even though I did not achieve a very good result. Some of the students were really good. They simply had the knack for it. I've learnt that I'm one of those who learn slowly. Slow and steady, right?

On to another subject. This week is the week of the dead in Singapore. It's the week of QingMing. Some people burn incense paper where I live (I'm guessing it's for qingming) and it has caused considerable damage to my breathing apparatus - my nose. Today I can barely hear as my good ear is blocked up. Isn't it ironic that paying respects to the dead is causing damage to the living? I won't lie and say I'm not distressed by my hearing issues. Hope the burning stops so I can breathe normally. Peace out.