Screen Printing, logos and branding
We were excited to have Leanne Taylor come in to teach us all how to screen print. The Earth School Sewing Collective have been working on enterprise ideas for generating funds and making things to sell at the Carterton Farmers Market. We have had a lot of success with our re usable produce bags and our lavender bags. The students discussed the need for branding to let customers know who they were and what they were doing. So we did some work making signs for the market and have had stamps and a screen made with our Earth School Logo.
Our work with the Carterton Boomerang bags working bees introduced us to screen printing bag labels and the multitalented artist from King Street Arts, Leanne Taylor. Leanne introduced us to the marvelous Eloise Evans from The Neighborhood Studio who made us our silk screen.
Technique of Silkscreen Printing
Since during printing, the ink is pressed through the meshes of the screen, before printing the screen has to be prepared by sealing the areas which should not be printed. This can be done by manual covering or by the use of a photomechanical process.
The easiest way of sealing the screen is to attach stencils from papers or foils to it. Another manual way is to draw on the screen with a liquid screen filler, which seals the screen after hardening. There are many other manual ways of preparing the screen, and some of them are very experimental.
However, the most common way is the photomechanical transfer of positive films. For that, an even layer of a photo sensitive emulsion is applied to the screen. After drying, the screen, covered by the prepared film, is exposed to UV light, which hardens the photo sensitive layer.
The parts of the screen which were covered by the film - and thus were not exposed to the UV light - do not harden and can be washed out with water. The exposed areas, however, do harden and so close the meshes of the screen.
The Earth school students were excited to print their own t-shirts and labels for our handmade products.