I’ve been wanting to do some work on expanding my artistic repertoire for a while now, and since I committed to reducing the number of custom painting commissions I was taking on in the new year, it’s exactly the right time to start working toward what is next for Senn & Sons.
I spent the entire weekend with my friend Michelle – the owner of A Second Story, a new gallery and printmaking studio here in San Francisco – so she could help teach me the ins and outs of screen printing.
After studying printmaking at RISD and working to become a master printer in San Francisco, Michelle opened up A Second Story with a couple of partners to have a space to bring artists together to work, collaborate and show their work in their gallery space. She is the perfect person to act as my mentor as I begin to learn the process of screen printing, and her studio is the perfect space to make it happen. I’m a printmaking novice, so she had a pretty steep learning curve to deal with.
It’s definitely going to be a process to get to a point where I have editions of prints worthy of sharing, but for a first go at silk screening, I’m feeling pretty good about what’s possible, and very excited to get back into the studio with some new designs and ideas.
Here’s a look at some bits and pieces of my process.
I prepared transparencies…
Degreased (washed) screens, and dried them…
Added photo-sensitive emulsion to the screens, then burned my images onto them…
Hooked the screens up to this amazing four-color press…
And silk screened a whole lot of test prints…
Trimmed them to size…
And went home with a mind filled with new skills and ideas, a bag filled with test prints, and a long list of things to think about for the next round in the studio.
I can’t wait until I’m back in the studio trying out a few new things. There are so many possibilities with printmaking, especially screen printing, that my head is spinning with ideas and things I want to try. Hopefully I’ll have some fun new things to add to my shop this spring.
(A huge thanks to Michelle at A Second Story for her patience and guidance. I know there’s still a lot to learn, but I feel really great about how much we were able to accomplish in just a weekend.)
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