Silkscreen Printing for Pen and Ink Artists

In the past couple of posts, I have been describing how I make my drawings.   Here, I will describe how I make my prints.


The artwork that I sell is in the form of hand-printed limited-edition prints which can be seen in shows (tba), at Frog Hollow in Burlington, and through my website (the site is not currently set up for orders, but contact information is available there).  I hand-print each image using a silkscreen, in editions of 200.   This means that only 200 prints are available of each image, and once sold, the edition is closed.  This increases the value of the individual print without requiring me, the artist, to die first.  
I find that this works in my favor, and it also allows more than one person to own a print of a particular drawing.  The piece will have the distinction of being drawn by the artist, printed by the artist, and signed and numbered by the artist.


I am going to describe the process here.  I am often asked how the prints are made and how I can get so much detail using silkscreens to make them.   This post should should answer this question for those interested, and perhaps be an introduction to other artists who might consider silkscreen printing.  It is less a tutorial than a description, and more detailed information and  guidelines can certainly be found elsewhere.


First a brief primer for those who are unfamiliar with silkscreen printing.  A fine mesh screen (imagine a window screen with the mesh so fine you need a magnifying glass to see the openings) is stretched onto a frame.   To make an image, any areas not part of the image (not to be printed) are sealed off.  For example, to print a donut shape, we would seal off all but a large circle, then seal off a smaller circle inside the first one.   This would leave a porous, unsealed portion of the screen in the shape of an O.

The ink used in silkscreen printing is fairly thick, somewhat gelatinous.  When the screen is laid upon a sheet of heavy paper, and ink is scooped out onto the screen’s surface, it doesn’t seep through (as would India Ink or another very fluid ink).   

To produce a print, the thick ink is pressed through the screen onto the paper below by drawing a  a squeegee across the surface of the screen. (The squeegee consists of a long blade of somewhat flexible material (e.g. hard rubber) mounted along the length of a wooden board-like handle).  Once the ink is pressed through the screen, the frame is lifted off the paper, leaving the image.

And now to answer the question, "how do you get a highly detailed ink drawing to a silkscreen?"

Screens may be sealed in a number of ways, including preparing a stencil and attaching it to the screen, or hand-painting on a liquid sealant.   But in our case, we are talking about a photo-emulsion process.

To transfer a detailed pen & ink drawing to a screen,  a light-sensitive gel, or photo-emulsion, is applied (painted on) the screen to seal the entire surface.  It has a much slower exposure rate than traditional photo film or paper so preparation can be done under low light (a yellow bug light will work).  The dried coating is water-soluble (it can be rinsed right off) until exposed to bright light for several minutes.

So the next step is to put your drawing flat against the coated screen, between it and a light source.  If using a light table, you will place your drawing down on the table and place the screen over it.  The light will pass through the paper and expose the screen, but it will be sufficiently blocked by any black lines on the paper.   After the appropiate exposure time (see the instructions on the bottle of photo-emulsion), the screen is rinsed thoroughly with water.     Every tiny line of your drawing will rinse out, leaving the rest of the the screen well-sealed.  Et voila, a detailed print!

For rinsing, I use a shower head on a hose in a utility sink- a bath tub will work as well.


Silkscreening is an economical approach to print-making.  All necessary supplies can be found at your local Art/Craft supply store.


See you at the next posting!

More on Drawing with Pen & Ink

In the previous post, I gave out some drawing tips.  I'll continue along this vein, though this will probably be less of a drawing lesson than an examination of the drawing process, as was the previous post, I think.


I do hope that the description of the drawing process will be of interest to those who own some of my work or have seen it, (i.e. at goodrichink.com) and to those who are working on their own drawing skills.   And also to those who simply share an interest in art.  And lastly, to those who can't find anything interesting to watch on TV.


I wrote in the previous post about drawing from life with pen and ink and how this approach offers a Zen-like experience because of the intense focus required to get it right the first time (no going back to erase mistakes).  This was the approach I used when documenting scenes and people in Togo, West Africa, where I lived for three years as a Peace Corps volunteer.   All the ink drawings you see in the "African Sketches" section of my website gallery were done this way.


Most of the artwork with pen & ink that I have done in the past several years while living in Vermont has had an underlying Vermont theme.  In the beginning, I approached the drawings in the same fashion discussed above, sitting in front of the scene and drawing everything directly in ink.  Some of these early examples include some churches.  The first picture here shows the hazards of drawing direct, without mapping out in pencil first. 


This is the First Universalist Unitarian Meeting House at the north end of Church St. in Burlington, VT.   I started the drawing at the top, working my way down and ran out of paper before I could depict the entire building...



Here are a couple other samples of this direct ink drawing approach:

The Chace Mill, Burlington, VT

The Old Brick Church, Williston, VT

As I progressed in building my portfolio of Vermont images, I wanted to increase the complexity and detail in my drawing.  And to make the best use of my time (which became all the more important as my family gradually grew from two to four humans), I began to outline my drawings first in pencil.   The idea was reduce the inherent risk of messing something up (proportion, composition, etc.) long into a detailed drawing, thus making it a throw away.


In addition, and because the free time one has in the years BC (before children) dwindles to almost nothing AD (after delivery), I took to photographing my subjects and working from the photos.  
Drawing from photographs is similar to drawing direct from life.    


In both cases. the rendering of negative space is very useful. (see previous post "About Drawing with Pen & Ink") 

Intensely focused observation is key.  


Also, seeing shapes in two rather than three dimensions is essential (again, see previous post).  Even though, with a photograph, the scene has been reduced for you to two dimensions, your brain has the tendency to interprete the objects in it as existing in 3 dimensions.  And therefore, you tend to interpret sides of barns (for example) as receding into the distance, rather than an assortment of irregular two dimensional shapes set side by side.   Training your mind to see and draw two dimensional shapes is the goal.

Here are some other techniques I find useful (oooooh.. free how-to-draw tips!).  They work both with traditional quill-type ink pens as well as rapidograph-type pens, but several came about as a result of experimenting with the fixed-width point of the rapidograph pen.


Here is an example of a drawing done using a reference photograph (apologies for the low quality image).  

Church Street   - Burlington, VT

It includes a fuller version of the truncated church shown near the top of this post.   It also shows people that wouldn't have stood still enough for me to draw them.  It shows great detail which would have required several extensive visits to the location.  But after a few photos taken, I worked on this drawing entirely at home, penciling in things first, then inking.


And here are a couple of techniques I use in drawing with ink:
Shading:
In achieving differing values with pen and ink (creating a range from light to dark areas), you increase the density of the ink marks as you get darker.  
I tend to work with close parallel lines, the closer the darker.  To get even darker, I draw more close parallel lines at an angle over the first ones.  This is called crosshatching.


Another common technique (which I don't use much) is  "stipling".   This is the use of dots of ink in varying density.   Crowd them together for a dark area, spread them apart in lighter areas.  
People often ask me if this is my technique, most likely because they remember the term and notice that I frequently make use of dot marks in my drawings.  However, I don't tend to "stiple" much at all - I prefer working with lines.  For the most part, I use dot marks to soften and darken cross-hatched areas, or to add texture, but not to define form or shading through density.   I also use dot marks in drawing lines and in crosshatching - breaking the lines up in order to make them lighter.   With a traditional quill pen, you can vary a line's thickness by pressing down and releasing more ink.  But with a rapidograph pen (my tool of choice), the thickness of line is determined by and limited to the size of the tip.  I work with the same pen for an entire drawing (convenience and laziness), so, instead of thin-lined crosshatching to create a light shading effect, I crosshatch with dotted or broken lines.  

As I said above, I avoid using stipling (personal preference), but here is an exception which shows how effective it can be as a technique.  It worked because the forest background was to be soft, or blurred even, so as not to take the eye's  attention away from the figures of the children and the pile of hay tossed in the air.


Well, then...I tend to ramble, and I am feeling that I must bring this to an end so that you can read it, and I can come up with something else to say on a future post.

About drawing with pen & ink

Here is a drawing that I made when I was living in Togo, West Africa.  There are several others you can see in my online gallery in the African Sketches section (goodrichink.com).  It was a fairly quick sketch and done (I believe) with a rapidograph pen.  This was in the town of Atakpame at restaurant on a hill.  I must have stopped in for a coffee or a beer.  And had my sketch book with me.

I like it because it captures the quiet of an afternoon.  The place was empty except for these two women chatting.

Drawing with ink, rather than pencil, presents its challenges.   But it is also  a great exercise in discipline and focus.  You can not go back to erase and correct.  There is a zen-ness about this.  You become so focused on the object in front of you, that nothing else exists - for a period of time, you are one with the scene that you are drawing.

There are some tricks and techniques, which I will talk about, but highly focused observation is at the core of it.   Your eyes and mind may be shifting between the view and the paper in front of you, but you are constantly carrying the mentally imprinted image with you as you look down to your paper.  So you never quite leave it during the whole process.

Another thing to note is that you are translating something from three dimensions to two.   But in my approach, this comes about as a consequence of the focused observation and not through any mechanism such as using perspective lines - another old technique was to suspend a glass plane between the artist and the scene and "trace" the three dimensional reality seen through the glass onto the two dimensional plane of the glass. 

I suppose I've trained myself to do just that without the glass.  Let me see if I can explain what I mean...  Look at the stonework railing, how it goes from left to right and then turns toward the viewer - a change in the perspective. When drawing this, however, I had no thoughts about perspective.  I simply drew the object as I saw it in two dimensions.  Rather then try to draw something coming toward me, I drew the parts that made up the view - a darkly shaded rectangle that is the end of the railing, then a rhombus sort of shape to its right, with top and bottom sides angling up toward the right. I'm working with pure two dimensional shapes rather than an object that recedes into the page.  The result is the appearance of an object that recedes into the page.

A key concept or technique that is helpful in accurate drawing is negative space.  The trees, the women, the porch make up the positive space - they are the subject of the drawing.  The negative space is everything that is not the subject.  It tends to form abstract shapes and these shapes tend to be easier to draw.  The reason for this is that the brain is not distracted by all the associations that come with to the concrete shapes of people, buildings, etc. 

So instead of drawing the head of the woman on the right (and thinking about head size proportional to body, or thinking about her posture), I am drawing the white shape around her head, between the tree trunks and below the foliage (left).  Her leaning posture, the placement of her arm, her head, and the positions of the tree trunks become defined by this shape.

Likewise, I'll draw the shape that embraces the other woman's head, and is contained by the two tree trunks to her left and right, as well as the horizontal line of the railing at the base of the shape (above on left).   The size and position of the tree trunks and branches as well as the height of the woman's head relative to the other woman  are now established and easy to start filling out with detail.  Using negative space is extremely helpful.

I'll be writing more about drawing technique in future posts, but my dog is wanting something right now and won't shut up.

More thoughts on being an Artist

In the previous post, I was pondering over what it means to be an artist and ended my thoughts with practical steps to take you from being "an artist in your own mind" to becoming an actual artist, a practicing artist.  A day or two after writing that post, it was "open studio" week-end, where, referring to a guide, you can hop from artist studio to artist studio in your local area, and further beyond, if you wish.  I think my writing gave me impetus to get out and visit a couple of real artists....  Then, yesterday, at a track meet,  I ran into a parent who is also a painter.  And now I may be begin to contradict my previous statements.

Actually, the artists I met in their studios were indeed practicing artists, and thus fit into my definition of what it means to be an artist.  Seeing their work and their enthusiasm, I also learned first hand a other bit of advice to give myself and anyone else who is as excited about receiving my advice as I am.


And here it is: interact with other artists.   This goes against my inner hermit nature, but I can tell it's good medicine.  So, in addition to finding subject matter, choosing a medium, getting the necessary supplies, and finding a market or outlet where you can eventually show your work,  I neglected to include seeking human contact with other artists. 


I joke not when I refer to my inner hermit nature.   I am happy when I am alone in my cave.   But a part of my brain knows that getting out in the sun for a little vitamin D and human interaction is also good.  And I have a wife who sometimes gives me a shove.


Here is what I re-learned.  There are artist leagues in my area. Their members meet and have group shows to display their work.   My wife has tried to nudge me toward them in the past.   But I had other things to do, and my cave was too cosy.   So I won't mention this again until I've joined one in September.... But the advantages seem to be many, including additional opportunities to show, motivation and inspiration from others. But I said I wouldn't mention this again, so there.


I met this parent at the track meet.  I didn't know he was an artist until I ran into him at a show we were both in a few years ago. You should see his paintings.   Anyway, he hasn't been painting for awhile.   What with son in baseball, daughter in track and everything else that comes flying at you in life.   He said he likes to think of himself as in a germinating phase.   Here's where I contradict my previous posting.   I consider him an artist.   Who knows if he'll ever return to the canvas.  I think he will.   But
I consider him an artist.  
You should see his paintings.    
I believe there is some truth to what I say, but nothing holds fast.  


There are no rules in Art.  

See David's artwork at goodrichink.com