Silkscreening is a great way to get your designs onto paper, fabric, metal, wood- pretty much anything! The method doesn’t actually use silk- but it’s a fine mesh that’s stretched across a frame.  It allows you to use more complex design that a a stencil and spray paint or paint because the mesh allows you to attach islands that would otherwise be lost. You can block off areas of the screen in various ways- using a light sensitive fluid to create a very detailed image, or using viscous fluid to block out some parts of the mesh. The very simplest version of silkscreening uses a stencil, and this is the method I’m going to explain here.

This particular method uses contact paper (or sticky-back plastic as it’s known to schoolchildren and librarians alike), but you can also use a sheet of acetate, paper, card or stencil film. I’m going to go with contact paper for this one because although it’s not really re-usable (many prints can be made with the one stencil, but once you clean up and peel it off it’s pretty much gone) it does happen to make pretty clean images.

You will need:

Contact paper

Brown plastic-y parcel tape.

Exacto knife.

A screen with mesh.

A squeegee.

Screen printing ink- or acrylic paint with screen printing medium.

Good paper.

Scrap paper.

Again, this is a project to organise before any ink is poured because screens can and will clog if you leave them- and a wasted screen is a sad thing.

1. Cut your design. Cut through both layers of contact paper, and bear in mind that the negative space will be printed.

If you have any ‘islands’ (bits of contact paper that will stop ink touching the paper- unconnected to the main stencil by bridges) make sure you keep these, and if necessary label them.

2. Remove the paper backing from your contact paper and stick it to the flat (under) side of your screen. It’s easiest to do this by peeling one edge at a time, smoothing from the centre and sticking it bit by bit to the screen- try not to get any bubbles trapped!

3. When this is done you can turn the screen over so the recessed side is facing you. Use your brown tape to mask off all the other space in your screen, working from the edges towards the centre. This can get a bit screwed up if you don’t know the trick! Take off a length of tape roughly equal to the inner edge of the frame. Hold each end in a hand, and ‘fold’ it, whilst trying not to handle the sticky side too much. Place on the screen- pushing the central section down first and moving outwards.

After the four sides are done, the entirety of the screen not covered by the stencil also have to be covered.

4. Once your screen is nice and ink-proof, mix up your paint. The silk screen ink can be used pretty much out of the pot, but the acrylic medium needs to be mixed up- “from 0.5-1 part to 1 part colour” or in regular language: pretty much half and half. If you’re mixing up a colour, always add the medium first, then the lightest colour, and so on, in order to avoid mixing excess paint.

5. Paint mixed, screen taped, paper ready? Time to screen! Pour out about a tablespoon of your ink onto the top of your screen, then use your squeegee to draw it across your screen, in one movement with barely any downward pressure, and holding the squeegee at about a 45 degree angle. This should flood your screen with ink, and hopefully shouldn’t force the ink onto the surface below. Then place your good paper below and use a similar action in the opposite direction with a firm pressure to force out the ink onto the paper or fabric.

For every image you screen there should always be the two movements with the squeegee- the flood and the screen. The flood is a lighter movement, and merely causes the ink particles to be held in the fine mesh exposed by your image. The following action, should be firmer and should cause the ink to be transfered to the paper or fabric below. If you need to leave your screen for a minute or two- always flood it first to make sure the ink doesn’t dry quickly and block the mesh.

6. Dry your prints- the obligatory photo showing off my paper drying line.

7. Fini!

Rubber stamps are, as a rule, foul. They’re twee and sentimental, a low-fi clipart. But you can make your own rubber stamps, an easy way to reproduce your own designs. I made a simple design to show you how.

First cut an ordinary eraser to size.
The firmer, white ones seem to work best and the pink, crumbly ones are terrible!
Draw your image directly onto the eraser, or trace it and scribble on the back to transfer the pencil to the eraser. Remember that the image will be reversed!

Then start carving around your image. I’m using a V shaped gouge in the picture shown- it’s a wood carving tool really, but it does the job. You can also use a scalpel, but remember- don’t cut directly downwards, if you cut on a slope the stamp will be much more stable.

Carve away, and then ink it up and test it. Mine were pretty messy at this stage, but it’s useful to do as it highlights on the rubber where the peaks are.
For ink, you can use a regular stamp pad, which come in billions of colours, or you can simply use a bottle of ink and a brush, or for the really low-fi, a waterbased marker pen will do the job.

When I had the stamp how I liked it I cut all around the edges, to make sure I’d gotten rid of the bumpy bit. This is of course optional.

The stamps can be a little fiddly to hold, so I cut a piece of thick card to mount it on, and pressed the stamp onto the back for reference.

The finished stamp.
PVA glue seems to hold it in place fairly well.

I used my stamp to create a pattern, which I scanned in and edited in Photoshop to make a repeating patter with a handmade feel.

You can use these for all sorts of things though; stamp them on packing labels to make stickers, business cards, wrapping paper, make an entire zine with them, create your own movable type set, or use them as a stepping stone for linocutting.

I first had a go at this medium a year ago to spread the word about buy nothing day, but pretty much forgot until a week ago when I found the beautiful stamps of craftpudding, an etsy seller who constructs amazing stamps using her own designs, and very faithfully rendered fonts.

craftpudding flickr.
craftpudding etsy.