Fine Art Screen Printing Techniques

A guide to screen printing as a supremely accessible art.

Fine art screen printing techniques.

The stenciled image blocks the ink on the other side to create the image. Or serigraphy is a type of stenciling that involves designing an image and then applying the paint or ink through a screen which is typically called a silk screen. It remains to be seen whether the latest fine printing techniques alter this assessment. Today fine art prints.

A fine art print is a multiple original made by hand one impression at a time from a plate usually wood copper zinc or in this case amberlith film etched or carved by the artist with original fine art prints the tactile quality of the ink on paper and the printing style are inseparable parts of the artwork. Screen printing may be adapted to printing on a variety of materials from paper cloth and canvas to rubber glass and metal. While the woodcut technique first became popular for its practical uses such as printing books and decorating textiles it eventually became an art form of its own. If there is ever an arena where the printmaker is able to play and experiment it is for sure with the screen printing technique allowing a diverse range of surfaces for production and with it breaking up the border between the consumerism arena and the bubble of fine art editions screen prints also known as silkscreens since their big entrance to the world of art in 1960 s are continuing.

Something you cannot achieve with reproductions. The resulting fine prints impressions while not original in the sense of a fine art painting or drawing are considered nevertheless to be works of art in their own right even though they exist in multiples. The mesh was sometimes made from silk which led to the technique s alternative name silk screen printing. The earliest recognizable form of screen printing appeared more than 1 000 years ago in china during the song dynasty.

Originally based on a hand stenciling method the process soon evolved into using fine mesh stretched over a frame. Woodcuts are a subset of relief printmaking where you carve out negative space from a surface leaving only the lines and shapes that you want to appear in the print. Artists have used the technique to print on bottles on slabs of granite directly onto walls and to reproduce images on textiles which would distort under pressure from printing presses. Originally this was either a metal plate engraved in intaglio or a wood block or metal plate cut in relief.

Art league instructor nancy mcintyre demonstrates techniques for silk screen printing with block out stencils including tips on registration marks and mixin. Both warhol and rauschenberg extended the technique by screen printing a design onto a canvas to serve as the basis of a painting.