Screenprinting

BRAINSTORM SKETCHES
We started out the screenprinting process with brainstorming sketches. The sketches were done on the outline of T-Shirts to help us plan our designs. The requirement was for 10 sketches. I settled on the non-binary design as I liked the repeating circles of the design and also want to express my gender identity on a t-shirt.

FINAL SKETCH
The final sketch is drawn to the proportions that we actually will print the design as. I made sure to draw all the geometric shapes of my very geometric design as accurately as I could. The design is all black since we'll be screenprinting with a single color only.

ILLUSTRATOR
The Illustrator design is the final iteration of the design process. This will be printed as a transparency to be screenprinted.

TRANSPARENCY
My transparency was printed on valuable transparency sheets that we put into the override tray. My design only took up a small portion of the transparency, so I cut it down into a smaller rectangle.

PREPPING SCREEN
My screen already was quite dirty and had a previous design silhouetted on it. I washed out the screen using a hose and a green spray. I then cut out a portion of photo-sensitive stencil the same size as my transparency, and mounted it on the screen using water.

MERCURY EXPOSURE UNIT
The mercury exposure unit imprints light through the transparency onto the stencil. This means that we can then rinse the stencil out using a high-powered hose.

RINSING OUT SCREEN
I rinsed out the screen's stencil using a hose and by rubbing on the stencil with my hand. Within 4 min of rinsing, the entire design was done, and all the stencil covering it had fallen off.

BLOCKING OUT
I didn't get to this part of the process because I ran out of time. We would have applied blockout in order to prevent the ink from going anywhere besides the spaces in between the stencil.

MAKING A TEST PRINT
A test print helps us make sure that the screen printing is done perfectly and that we don't have any problems before we put the screen onto our T-Shirts.

FINAL PRINT
If I had gotten to this step, I would have clamped down the screen and then applied ink using an ink knife. I would have then used a squeegee and pulled it towards myself at a 45 degree angle. I then would have scraped additional ink back into the bucket. I then would have done the actual printing onto my garment.

CLEANUP
If I had done this stage, I would have washed away the ink on my screen. I would have returned all materials back into their respective places.