feather2pixels

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.

This is a Polaroid taken during last weekend’s backpacking trip to Henry Coe State Park: land of endless wildflowers, land of eternal allergies.  What I will remember about this trip is that the days were hot, we were constantly surrounded by wild turkeys and there was a lot of mating going on.

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.

I recently organized a dinner for our department’s top seniors and so it was that last night at Chevy’s Fresh Mex Vallejo a table for twenty-six was reserved for Professor .  My colleagues thought that was really funny.  Then I got carded, which was even funnier to everyone.  Funniest yet and several Gold Rush margaritas later was the check.  I didn’t think it was possible to spend this much money at Chevy’s.

Instead of explaining the last few weeks, I will just post some pictures: