Yesterday an artist friend drove over to spend the day with me out in my “wet studio”, commonly known as the patio. I have a delicious screened-in place out back 19 feet long by 13 feet wide or so. She was wanting to learn some silk screening techniques so we went at it. We did soy wax designs and blue gel glue designs on the screens. We did paper resist screening and we did deconstructed screening. The “flavors” (dye colors) of the day were: terra cotta, chartreuse, eggplant, and turquoise.

The sun was so hot yesterday that we could literally “bake” the deconstructed designs on the screen in fairly short time. Then, if the dye pooled at all, it took many pulls to get it all out of the screen.  In this photo Julia is contemplating the screen design before printing.

This one made some awesome prints. This is just one of the many.

For patterns, this screen used a latex glove, wide rubber bands (our new love!), and large bubble wrap.  She got a lot of prints off of it and then I also printed to try and get the dried up paint designs off of it.

Here are some of my completed pieces.  These are all fat quarter size.

This one is just about my favorite.  Colors: turquoise and terra cotta, dirty print paste mixed with golden yellow.  Technique:  I used a glue screen.  I’ve been using this one for awhile and the glue is amazingly resilient.  It is breaking down in areas and could be touched up with more glue, but I used it as is.  Curiously, I planned on using a plain screen with no design, but didn’t have any available!  So I was stuck using this one!  I am SO glad I did.  I cut out some freezer paper curlie-q’s to mask out areas.  First printing with the turquoise, let dry a little bit, then I came back with the terra cotta, laid the screen down differently to get this layered, collage look.  I love the layered look, and the screen with glue curlie-q’s  is a perfect background pattern for my larger freezer paper curlie-q’s (I actually didn’t plan that).  At the end of the day, Julia was using a syringe to add some detail designs onto her cloth…I monoprinted the yellow bits that you see off of her golden yellow circles.

This piece: same technique…colors: terra cotta first, then chartreuse.

This one started life as “the dropcloth”.  Using turquoise and chartreuse I screened some of the pattern onto it, then came back later with eggplant and a syringe and outlined some of the curlie-q’s.  Later, as above, I did some monoprinting off of Julia’s circles with the golden yellow.  It needed that color.

This was a white piece of cloth stamped with melted soy wax.  Then it was cracked and I brushed chartreuse and terra cotta dye paint on it…this is the BEFORE picture….and following is the after picture…

The white areas are really white…I expect I will go in with either dye or paint and tone them babies down!

These are a few more pulls off of Julia’s lovely screen.

This one is at the end of the day…it got everything thrown at it.  Julia made a gel glue screen which is the repeated design you see.  I printed it over some stripes and then in the bottom row, we made an interesting find….I laid small bubble wrap under the cloth, then laid the glue screen on top and made a pull.  On the far right is that image…the cloth shows some of the bubble wrap pattern.  The middle image is the most fascinating one.  As I made the first pull with the bubble wrap beneath the cloth, the bubble wrap pattern shows up on the screen.  I removed the bubble wrap, made a print and the middle one is the result.  You only really get one good print using this temporary technique, but there was still a bit of the patterning left in the next pull (the far left print). That was an interesting discovery…I am not sure if I have seen others do that or not.  The random chartreuse pattern that you see is from rolling dye paint onto the pebbly texture of a liner for a paint pan.  The roller picks up that texture and you can print it right off the roller.

It was totally exhausting standing out  on the concrete all day, but we had  a really fun time exploring printing. I kind of want to keep going today…everything is still out there in the patio!