feather2pixels

I almost never screen print t-shirts.  I’m not good at it and there are loads of other people who are.   Just about the only shirt printing I do is for other people.  That was the situation on Sunday.  A friend of a friend was interested in making some shirts for her physical therapist assistant program (as any reputable department should be), so we got together and did some textile printing.

I was reminded of the power of grey.  Simple.  Versatile.  Sexy.  Definitely my favorite color, like that dude from Counting Crows.  The shirts didn’t even turn out that awful:

Here’s a little piece I put together for my friend Cooper.  It’s a screen print on wood and a year’s worth of MUNI fast passes.  He’s giving to someone special for Christmas and it’s better than anything I am giving this year.

This year I was in charge of organizing Cellspace open studios (to the extent that Cellspace can be organized). We had buttons, a cardboard stage, performance installations, and smoked Gouda. Some Korean students interviewed me on tape and I ate three burritos in 4o hours.  I screen printed a one layer poster for the occasion. Some other pictures:

The Temporary Spaces found a few homes this summer.

First they were displayed at Dogpatch Biofuels, San Francisco’s only biodiesel filling station. This seemed especially apt, since many of the cityscapes depict the Dogpatch itself. Of course in the continuum of artistic practices, screen printing is the probably one of the most eco unfriendly processes out there. But maybe not as bad as aborted fetuses.

During the month of July, all the pieces were displayed at Liberty Cafe in ever-lovely Bernal Heights. This opportunity was courtesy of my friend, Danielle, who shoots compelling photos of kids (and therefore had to leave her Cellspace studio because of the pot smoke). Anyway, the business features a cozy restaurant and a bakery cafe, the neighborhood go-to spot for fresh Brioche. I’m not sure how much of a splash my art made, but I’m running out of room in my studio to store these. Free storage.

So after the screen printing area at Cellspace was ransacked by a former employee (once upon a time Cellspace had employees), I was given the opportunity to put my woodworking skills to the test.  The test in question was successfully building a new lightbox with which to expose screens, about a one half on the carpentry difficulty scale from one to ten, and I am ashamed to say that I could barely manage it.

The screen printing workshop for kids was not a complete disaster.  I’ll be damned if every kid in that whole school didn’t get to make a print.  Some of them didn’t even hate it.
Here is a somewhat painful excerpt from the into to one of the last sessions.  I think I make five assumptions before the first three seconds are up.  Teacher of the year right here.
[flv:http://www.feather2pixels.com/blog/post_video/screen_demo.flv 320 240]

Some days I feel like screen printing is less of an art form and more of a series of things that can go wrong.  Having worked out my emulsion issues for the time being, I agreed to run a daylong printing workshop with fellow Explainer alum Kristin at the elementary school where my friend Raymond works.  Seven session, seven grade levels, forty minutes a pop, and Kristin will be dressed as The Cherry Ghost.  But as the day of the workshop approaches, I find myself questioning how screen printing—which only works on the days that everything goes right—will happen amidst the near-infinite entropy of two hundred kids.  The Second Law of Thermodynamics practically guarantees that there is now way in hell this is going to work.

To make matters worse, my game plan is probably overly ambitious.  Ridiculous, now that I think about it.  The idea is that each student would make a print of their teacher.  Example design of Ms. Baum:

The little kids would print one layer, two for the the older kids.  We spent yesterday prepping the screens, and today the gravity of the task at hand is apparent.  I am just not lucky enough to make this work.

Will Franken has been mentioned more than once on this website and it my pleasure to mention him once again in the capacity of subject of my latest poster.  It is a set of 42 4-layer screen prints to commemorate his show this Friday at The Purple Onion.  Ten copies were retained for my archives, one was taped to the window of Cafe La Boheme, one will be displayed outside the show, and I am not sure what Will will do with the remaining thirty, but I secretly hope they will be dispursed to guests on Friday.  And everyone knows that when you want a secret to come true, you must post it on the internet.

Now for what you have been waiting for: the posters measure 10×16 inches and were printed with Matsui water based inks on Bristol paper.  As usual, the computer does not do the print justice and as a side note, these were some of the most frustrating little bastards I have ever had to deal with.  Mostly that’s due to a new emulsion that I was experimenting with.  Emulsion is the photosensitive polymer that forms the stencil on the screen and to make a long story slightly less long but probably just as boring, it took me a whole afternoon and two ruined screens to figure out that this particular emulsion underexposes under 12 seconds and overexposes over 13 seconds.  That is fucking crazy.   You can see what underexposed looks like if you look hard at the top layer of dark brown line work.  See how it’s kind of sloppy and light?  It needed one more second of light, probably.  But I somewhat liked its rough quality and very much did not feel like burning a new screen.

If you want to see what the design looked like before I granted it physical manifestation, click here and scroll down.  But only if you promise to believe that any print looks one hundred times better than any lousy digital design.
In conclusion, fuck Ulano QX-1 and fuck computers.

The anatomy poster is done!  All you have to do to see it is move your mouse over the the all-knowing more link and click.  Wait, did I say mouse?  Of course you wouldn’t ever move your mouse over a computer screen.  That would be ridiculous.  I meant move the pointer that is controlled by your mouse.  Or maybe you don’t even have a mouse.  Maybe it is a track pad.  Or a stylus, like my friend Nowell uses.  Could even be one of those useless red nubs.  Oo, any trackballs in the house?  I am sorry for making so many assumptions. I was just trying to suggest that there is a small possibility that the act of activating the more link could be worth your time.  In the future I promise to be a scrupulous Californian and do my part to promote a non-specific, assumptionless society.  (more…)

So after a lot of frustration, I finally used brush and ink to design a screen print with all organic elements.  Nothing lifted from any cameras or old textbooks.  The project is a poster for my friend Eric‘s band, Silian Rail, and this morning I experimented with mini mock ups on 8 x 14 inch Bristol paper.

(more…)

Check out this special metallic ink I got.

My plan to post every day of this week was about as successful as Glenn McCoy’s plan to be an acceptable member of the media.  Keep your internet goals as vague as possible to avoid letdown, I guess.  On the other hand, there are many gratifying things in this life.  One of the most gratifying things about screen printing is its ability to translate almost any image, almost always for the better.  This encourages the hoarding element of human nature.  Forgotten texts and found trash treasures take on a new life printed through a polyester screen.

I’m way in to the idea of discovering great things in the world and then finding a way to make them work squeezed through a screen.   I’ve been working on a body-themed poster for one C.W.’s harebrained schemes.  After a lot of getting nowhere on the design, I finally turned to America’s favorite last resort.  The library.  For unknown reasons, the Maritime Academy library stocked a 1973 edition of Gray’s Anatomy and I unleashed the awesome scanning power of my Canon LIDE 80 upon it.  Now dozens of striking technical drawings from a bygone era are mine. All mine!  I cannot lose.

Abusin’ the rule-of-three:

I have been thinking a lot about posters lately.  If screen printing is the high calorie carbonated beverage of the printing world, then screen printed t-shirts are probably the Coke, screen printed posters are the Pepsi and mousepads are the R.C. Cola.  I was reminded of this during a recent visit to Mollusk Surf Shop, where every supply needed to construct an aesthetically harmonious surf lifestyle, from literature (coastal travel guides) to clothing (printed hoodies as far as the eye can see) to music (mostly Brightblack Morning Light), is all available within a perfectly designed 1500 square feet.  Anyway, the art gallery featured screen printed posters and they reminded me why I think screen printing is cool. Bold blocks of solid color, clever ways of doing more with less, a vague sense of incomprehensibility: bring on the rotten teeth.

This week I am a real artist.  I sold two Temporary Spaces sales to people that I know.  However, maybe even more exciting than those intra-zip code transactions were the Kid Monsters orders I received from the 94403 and the 34251.  I didn’t even know a zip code could start with a 3.