narcsblog

This month I’ve been working on some promo material for UNISON at London Metropolitan University.  They’ve begun a campaign to raise the subject of people skipping their breaks, and hope to encourage staff to take their full lunch breaks.

This was is project intended to raise a smile and lighten up the workplace, so a bit of harmless ribbing of unions was just the ticket.  The invites were printed by the wonderful Aldgate Press but for the small run of posters I decided to get my hands dirty.

I decided to document the printing process for the folk at UNISON and it seemed a waste to not put it on here.  If you’ve printed before please excuse the basic nature of this description but I’m hoping this will be of interest to folk who haven’t.

I To start with I had to get the artwork printed on tracing paper to make a up the screens for printing.

This is broken down into two colours, as each colour needs to be put on the page individually.

This is the studio.  It’s the East London Printmakers near London Fields.

That little room next to the screen racks is where I do all the cleaning out of the screens.  Its a tiny windowless room with a jetwash in it.  it gets pretty loud.

This is the exposed screen that I was half way through cleaning out at this point.

This is the point you can start to get a sense of how the artwork will cope with being on a screen.

I then chucked it outside to help it to dry

Now I’m nearly ready to print.  It’s just a case of registration of the paper to the artwork on the screen

I’ve already mixed my colours.

The ink is hand pulled through the screen for each colour of each poster

It means each sheet is lined up on the bed on masking tape guides I’ve placed.  They go in like this…

…and they come out like this.

I do all the posters in the base colour first, letting them dry in the racks whilst I prep the next colour in the screen.

Then it’s one more pull and the poster is finished.