Trial textile screenprinting

I’ve been in the screen printing workshop various times, but I didn’t have the chance to experiment with textile screen printing so far. This was due to uni closing down because of covid right after I completed my textile screenprinting induction.

After having booked another slot in the workshop I went in to start on my own textile screen prints. I was feeling a little rusty considering I hadn’t been in the workshop in over a year and a half, so the technician was happy to help me experiment with the mixtures onto fabric.

When printing onto fabric there’s a number of things you need to consider in comparison to printing onto paper. Fabric material soaks up colour in a different way, and the mixture you use to print onto fabric is also a different kind. My first textile prints were onto dark material so I had to figure out how to make the colour stand out without loosing my entire print. Before adding any colour, there’s two different mixtures you can choose from to make the base paint.____. One of them is an opaque mixture, and the other is transparent. When printing onto darker material you’d aim for an opaque mixture so that there’s a lighter base for the colour to stand out on the fabric. There’s also the option of printing multiple layers. So you could print an opaque layer initially, and then a transparent layer over the top. This means that there’s a base layer on the fabric which allows the layers that are printed afterwards to be seen more clearly.

It’s difficult to tell what the colour will look like on the fabric when the paint is still in the pot. Once the fabric absorbs the mixture there’s always a chance of the colour turning out unexpectedly. I was advised to test out the colour by just dabbing a small amount on the fabric if I have a small scrap available before actually using the screen itself. Additionally, when the paint is wet it hasn’t fully developed on the fabric yet so it needs to be dried before you can see the final result.

In this first trial I made a lot of mixtures just to test out how the opaque and transparent mixtures show on the fabric. Examples of the mixtures I made was 100% opaque, 50/50 opaque and transparent, 80% transparent 20% opaque with 5 drops of colour and many more. rather than just printing a layer of each mixture on its own, I also tested out overlapping layers over one another. This allowed me to see how some of the colours turn out on the fabric itself while also showing the difference if there’s a base colour underneath.