Archive for January, 2010

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For the love of screen printing

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

“I love simple black line art like traditional 1 color tattoo art. Sometimes a simple print that is done the right way on a nice garment looks best; very classic.”

I recently have been exploring the internet for educational information about screen printing and I found Jonathan Monaco of Catspit Productions, LLC I enjoyed his enthusiasm and obvious love of screen printing. He agreed to an interview to tell us a little about himself.

Jonathan how long have you been screen printing?
Screen printing has been in my family ever since I was born. My father has been involved in the sales of equipment and supplies for a very long time. As a result the act of screen printing has been a part of that as well, especially with the people around him. When they hear what he does for a living, they often ask how they can get started printing.

I printed my first tee shirts with my uncle in the basement of my home when I was only 11 years old. He built a wooden table top press and printed his own line drawings of animals in black ink on lighter colored shirts. I helped my brother while I was in high school to build a screen printing shop. He still runs his shop today in upstate New York. He taught me much of what I know about screen printing. The bottom line is I have been involved with screen printing for about 28 years. And textile screen printing is my forte. (more…)

Posted in Images, Ink, Screen printing | 6 Comments »

What to do for images?

Monday, January 25th, 2010

What do I print? Maybe you are like me and find that a challenging question. I have lots of ideas but it seems like it is difficult to get an image I like on a transparency. I am not very familiar with image editor software, but I am slowly learning to use Gimp in my spare time (ha, ha).

This weekend, I found a way to make images that I think has potential to work with my limited experience and time. I opened a generic flower photo in Gimp and made it into a black and white photo. I added a layer that was trasparent to trace the image. I then used the touchpad and traced the image. I picked the flowers that had the shape I wanted and just loosely drew around the design. I magnified the image and smoothed up and cleaned up the edges. I saved the transperancy with a white background and adjusted the image to be darker.


I am anxious to have a chance to make the transperancies and print the design. I would like to add a second color to the center of the flower with a paint brush to give the slight green highlight that dogwood flowers have. I am looking forward to experimenting with this idea to get more images to use. The best part is that I used free software and photos that I already have!

Michelle

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Free Images

Monday, January 25th, 2010

Drawing by Jim Bickell


We are including some free images for your personal use. Jim Bickell drew the ink drawing with stylized sun and mountain motif.

Al took used photos of our cameras and used PhotoShop to create the images. You can learn how he acheived this effect HERE

Twin lens reflex camera

Minolta SLR

Posted in Free Images, Images | 4 Comments »

A Yudu Emulsion sheet Walk Thru

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

Here’s what I learned when I was using YUDU emulsion sheets. The YUDU tutorial has good information watch it a couple of times before you start. Lots of good information is also found here:
Yudu forums
This site is an excellent resource for YUDUers. Let it be noted that I no longer use the sheets as I find that liquid emulsion is just as easy as the sheets, but that’s just my opinion. Also I do not discount using the sheets either. If the YUDU sheets were not so expensive I may still be using them. They work just as well as liquid emulsion. Their high cost caused me to do some research and I found using liquid emulsion much less expensive. I also found less expensive sources for emulsion sheets. So do your research and save yourself some cash.
The first thing you should do is clean your screen just in case…. There may be some foreign substance on the screen which may ruin the emulsion. Use a bit of dish soap that has ‘NO’ hand softener in it and rinse thoroughly. (more…)

Posted in Emulsion, Screen printing, Yudu | 1 Comment »

YUDU Registration Limitations

Sunday, January 17th, 2010

The YUDU is a fun machine for home crafters, however, when it comes multiple color registration it does have its limitations. If you are just laying color over color it is fine and you can get some really cool looking images that way. If you need accurate registration when laying color next to color, then you may have some problems.

I have tried all the tricks I could find to minimize the problems by researching and using every trick others have used. I started with spot color separation images that had registration marks applied by Photoshop. I checked them on the light table then I carefully burned my screens, made sure everything was lined up every time. (more…)

Posted in Ink, Screen printing, Yudu | 3 Comments »

Liquid emulsion as easy as 1-2-3

Sunday, January 17th, 2010

An important part of having good detail in your screen printing is having a good smooth coat of emulsion. For the new DIY screen printer this may seem like a daunting task (it did to me). You can read about our first experience in these two earlier posts.

I learn best when I watch a task several times and see how different people approach the task. So with that in mind, I have included three videos that show how to apply liquid emulsion from You Tube. I thought each had an interesting aspect to share and together give a pretty good look at how it is done. (more…)

Posted in Emulsion, Screen printing, Where to shop | 2 Comments »

3 Color Print

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

Below are some pics of a 3 color image I just did. It didn’t require any real registration basically I just laid the three images over each other and printed them.

The first pic shows a printout of how I wanted them laid out and the colors I wanted to use. At first I had the black camera at the top but it looked too heavy up there so I moved them around till I liked what I saw and printed it out.

Next I printed black images of each camera on Ink Jet transparencies. I then laid them out on the YUDU in their positions and made note where they were in relation to each other. I then burned each screen I was going to use placing each positive in its noted position as I went. (more…)

Posted in Ink, Screen printing | 1 Comment »

Yudu mix it up!

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

Hey everyone I thought I would share a print that I did all by myself. Of course I used one of al’s already burned screens but the camera looks awesome and at least I printed it myself :D .
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As you can see I’ve got a nice baby blue ink color. I knew I wanted blue but I didn’t want to do the blue yudo ink that we had so I thought I’d go ahead and mix my own. I put a nice size bead of both the white yudo ink and the blue on a little throw away plate we had and used a little spatula to mix it up. Then I used the spatula to smear the ink above the image and it was ready to go.

The hardest part of doing this is making sure you have enough of the ink mixed. I always need more than I think I do. This time it wasn’t really a problem because I was only lighting up the blue but I want to start making my own colors and that’s where I’m going to have to make sure I have enough.

I also wanted to try out something that Michelle has been doing a lot of lately, printing two colors on an image. This time I mixed some red ink with a little of the white to tone it down and put it onto the screen with the blue.

yudu site
I really like the way the colors mix.

So I’ve got a lot of ideas for a new project with my own image next time and can’t wait to start testing it out. Now I only have to learn how to burn my own screen and I’m set :) .

-Marie

Posted in Ink, Yudu | No Comments »

Yudu vintage paper

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

I love vintage designs. When I saw this image on at www.percyandbloom.com/the-vintage-moth.com I really wanted to make a journal cover.

Check out the download images available at the Vintage Moth for personal use. Abagail Mooney finds vintage images and provides free downloads. She also has some beautiful images for sale.

Al sized the image for me in Photoshop because it was very tiny and we wanted to retain as much of the image as possible. To resize, go to image sizing. In the drop down menu make sure to check both boxes for constrain proportions and resample image. Go to the document size area and click on the width dropdown menu and choose precent. Change the width to 110% and resize. Continue this process until image is the size you want. Al repeated the process 15 times at least, but it kept the image from being pixelated. The resampling adds new pixels rather than just making pixels bigger.

We burned on the same screen as one of Al’s projects and used 6 minute exposure time to keep the detail.

I used Yudu gunmetal as my base color for several prints. I then added a bit of yellow for a few prints and then added red.I scanned these images to try and get the best detail. There is a beautiful metalic shine that really isn’t visible in these pictures.

I plan on making booklet journals with our deep throat stapler to take to work to use for notes. I may print some text using our printer to further personalize my journal. It was a very fun, easy and satisfying project for today.

It is getting easier to flood the screen with ink and pull the ink. For the first time I didn’t pull so hard that I gooped up the image.

I hope you are having fun screen printing!

This image has a little red added:

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This image has a little of the yellow:

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This is Yudu gunmetal:
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Posted in Ink | No Comments »

Quick Yudu hints and tips 2

Friday, January 8th, 2010

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Here are some tips that may help:

1. To get more detail in your designs, reduce the time that you expose the screen.
We have found that fine lines show up much better after we tried this suggestion
from http://www.yuduforums.com

2. When printing an image and flooding the screen with too much ink, use paper
towels to clean excess ink and be able to continue printing without washing
screen.

3. You can get a more even coverage of ink on your project by upgrading to a
Yudu squeegee pro or a professional squeegee.

4. Make sure to use a cheaper less sticky packing tape or blue painters tape to
avoid damaging your screen.

5. We have two different labeled sponges for screen care, one for ink removal and
one marked for removing emulsion.

Missed the first hints and tips? click here!

Posted in Quick Yudu Tips | 1 Comment »

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