A weekend of screen printing

Day one: Two layers of print colour using hand cut stencil artwork

Day one: Three layers of print colour using hand cut stencil artwork

Day two: Hand cut stencil artwork in pattern repeat with finished bird print

Day two: Detail of finished bird print. Blue on organic cotton base cloth.

Day two: Detail of finished bird print. Yellow on stripe cotton base cloth.

As I mentioned in my last post I spent the weekend at a screen printing workshop in Brunswick at Harvest Workroom. Day one was spent designing three simple artworks each of which was then traced out onto stencil paper and hand cut. These three stencils were then used with a print screen and frame in various combinations so we could experiment with inks and layering of colour.
Day two was focused on creating a printable pattern using the Swiss Repeat technique (a version of which is outlined here), again this design was hand drawn and hand cut onto stencil paper. This method creates a pattern tile which can be repeated or tiled on all sides to create a yardage print. In the past I have created many pattern repeats in my working life using Adobe Illustrator but had never hand drawn a repeat, so this method was really interesting. And the process of printing a pattern repeat was also quite challenging and put the tiny part of my brain dedicated to mathematics to the test. All in all it was a very productive and fun weekend.