Developing silk screen printing skills

Introduction

 In this post, I'm going to reflect on the last stage of my Bradford 2025 project, in particular experimenting with screen printing.  

The brief was to create a textile expression that mapped my cultural experience of Bradford.  I chose to focus on my my experience of people and places (particularly buildings) on my walking journey from Forster Sq Station to Bradford School of Art using a montage of 'joiner' photos - see previous post for a description.  My plan is to realise this through a vertical flag or banner; screen printing the image on to fabric to create a prototype version.

I had tried creating my images using patchwork, applique and sublimation printing but each had its limitations for the task - too complicated, insufficiently figurative and rather a flat finish.  However, a little experimentation with screen printing suggested that it offered a simple but effective way of recreating my images on cloth.

A first experiment, a simple 'joiner' of the Alhambra

What is it that I like about the screen printed image?   I think it is the simplicity in terms of colours and shapes whilst retaining sufficient figurative detail to convey my joiner designs.  My applique/ patchwork approaches failed to do this.  In addition, there was a little serendipity in the outcome of the printing, as always at my stage of skill development.  There is a little unpredictable offset in the lines and unexpected overlap in the colours.  I think this makes the work interesting.  Lastly, it results in strong, clear, hues.  My biggest challenge will probably be replicating these on the desired scale. 

Making it work

The next stage was to take my 'joiner' images for the individual sites and buildings en route and combine them in a linear way.  Here is an example of a building (the Alhambra) with my route on the road that passes up the right hand side.  This is the last section before I turn into the Art School.

And in the next image, you can see that converted into the top of my design with other buildings and people incorporated into the journey.  

However, I felt the individual joiners were too separate and not combined into a journey so I manipulated a photograph of the image to reposition them.  I also began the process of converting the photographs into a simpler design that would lend itself to silk screen printing.  You can see this in the work on the Alhambra joiner at the top.

The tricky decisions were the amount of detail and the choice of colours and background so I decided to print some small versions (A3 height) to have a look at the outcome of my initial decisions.

I tried printing onto different coloured fabrics to compare the effect.  It doesn't show up terribly well in these photographs but overall, I think the off white background (calico and curtain lining fabric) fits better with the yellow/ orange in the colour palette.  The people need rethinking to fit in the open spaces better and to make it clear that some of them are the same people who have moved position.  I could also see that whereas the translucent orange, yellow, flesh colours overprinted well, the opaque blue and green did not work so well.  I cannot rely on anything printed over them being clearly visible.  I also feel that the orange, flesh, orangey yellow hues are not sufficiently contrasted so in my final version, I'm going to use rust, orange and orangey yellow.

Final stages 

I used the learning from the 'minature' version to rework my design with the slight changes to the colours as shown below.

I then stripped out most of the colour so it would print clearly in black and white for cutting my silk screen templates:

And finally, I tested my ink mixes and overlaps to finalise the order of printing:

This test printing reinforced that I couldn't easily cross print either the green or blue with other inks and, also, that the rust colour was too near to the orange.  It also revealed that on the textured calico cloth I was using for the test, I needed more than two runs of the squeegee to get a clean print. 

So, now I am ready to try printing the final version.  Interestingly, the individual design stages have  produced a range of exciting images from the detailed photographs to the last, very simplified, version with little colour.  An alternative outcome for this project could easily have been this series of studies in my joiner journey.