My degree show printmaking extravaganza

Printmaking has become an exciting part of my practice this year. At the end of my second year, I decided to complete an induction into printmaking and since then I have been experimenting and creating pieces with it. At the beginning of the degree show prep, I had the idea to use the printmaking facilities and I wanted to push myself far out so that the work I was creating was going to be on another level. The first obstacle of printmaking was choosing the best images to become a half-tone image (this is when the image becomes dots). I then began to plan how many images I was going to use for the screen prints as well as deciding on the right size. I had originally done some CMYK tests, these were not particularly successful. The overall outcome of those printings wasn’t great as I felt the colours were blocky, to the point where the image wasn’t even coming through. When I overlaid each colour on top, I found the CMYK’s didn’t blend well, therefore making it difficult to see the image until you added the black layer, but that was simply because It was just the outline. I also felt that the CMYK didn’t represent or bring the familiarity aspect of skin that I wanted in my work. So where did this improve? Well, first, I took the colour choices down from 4, to two. One black, and one a sort of flesh tone. I found that using just the two colours removed an element of colour detail from the images. This felt needed, as the prints had a simple complexity to them, and I didn’t want to overpower each image. Another reason for the two colours, although at the time it wasn’t a first thought, is that the printing process was halved. In essence, printing these prints onto the huge sheets of fabric using the CMYK process would have taken an incredibly long time, and as mentioned before, not aided the images. Following on, now knowing the process, I had to think about sizing. I had done all my tests A4 size to make testing simple, but now it was time to go big. I moved up to one of the biggest prints, which is A2. I wanted to incorporate a plethora of different sizes on the piece, so I created prints in A5, A4, A3, A2. In the images, I cropped the images down to either square or stretched them out, thus making some of the images even more distorted than before. One of the unique effects of screen-printing is that each print will be different, and not necessarily correct. But I found this quite exciting and relevant in my subject area as each body is different in its own unique way, so the prints being different each time shadowed this. I am excited to experiment with these prints as I am printing on fabric and I look forward to trying to display these sheets, and seeing what the folds bring.