Fun Dip & White Monster Energy Drink - Screenprinting Pt. 4

Things are going a little too smoothly…

One of the reasons for starting this blog was to serve as a paragon for truth, wisdom and excellence. I would never lie to you, I would keep my promises, and I would make my readers better people as they worked to be more like me. Simply put, as the primary influence on your life, any failings by me are yours as well. This week I didn’t keep a promise, and because of it you are a worse person.

I swore up and down that I would visit the studio this week to get ahead on my print. But I didn't. I did run over the Brooklyn Bridge all the way from Ridgewood with my running group, though! Here I am fretting about missing studio open hours, having zero fun:

By the time I got home, limping a bit from running around 11 miles (real men don’t stretch) it was way too late to bother with the commute to the studio before it closed. Another wasted opportunity that was everybody else’s fault, especially yours.

Over the ensuing days, all sorts of other shit happened and before I knew it I woke up Tuesday morning. Class day!

It was another day at the office just like any other. I ate this for lunch:

Treating myself

Nothing else eventful happened at work, aside from being called to my boss’s office as I was leaving at the end of the day. He told me that I wasn’t in trouble, but he was concerned as to why I was howling with laughter as I was standing at the urinal, as it made many of my coworkers uncomfortable. I explained that I was coming up with funny jokes for my blog, which I would later write into my “laughtop,” (what I call my laptop when I write funny jokes). He accepted this answer, and I hightailed it out the door and to the subway. He must never know the true reason.

I hopped on the train and scooted on down to Chelsea for class like a dog with irritated anal glands. I burst into the studio with the gusto of someone who had Fun Dip and White Monster Energy Drink for lunch. Nothing would stand in my fucking way today, and if it did I’d tell on them to teacher.

If you remember last week's blog, I had a screen prepped and ready to go when the TA announced it was time to wrap up our printing and clean up.

I didn’t remember last week's blog, and needed to read it to remember where I was and what I was doing. Once I was done reading and I had dried the tears that I had cried from laughing at my own jokes, I pulled out my screens.

Lo and behold, another student had left me a note! It was about this very blog!! Margo Dela Cruz left me a really cool note with very cool handwriting and a cool lil self-portrait, it really made my day to know someone's reading and was in the midst! She also has a blog on Substack, follow her!

With my ego properly inflated, I started with my orange layer.

Then something really, really weird happened. Everything started working. My orange layer went on without a hitch, the tape registration that the instructor had shown me last was lining up perfectly. My registration marks were even printing properly. I was ecstatic, filled with misplaced hubris, guaranteeing a swift and devastating folly.

I had my yellow color mixed and ready to go from last week. I thinned it out with some water to compensate for a week of drying, and did some test prints on newsprint. They came out fine, so far so good! Same with my test prints on white vellum, it was consistently bright and spot-on to my digital drawing.

But when I printed it on my thick, expensive printmaking paper, it looked like dogshit.

Had I thinned the ink too much? Was there too much transparent medium?

Luckily, it only affected my garbage test print that was very off-register. I decided to run a little experiment and added some more white and yellow-green ink to boost the pigment and give it some body. I ran it on another print and it didn’t look much different.

When I was in college I would have just powered through, making a big run of disappointing prints on expensive paper, but who cares my parents were paying for all of it.

But I’ve grown. I’ve talked about those bad print runs from undergrad 20 years ago to my therapist, and he surely knows exactly what I’m talking about. Even compared to last year, I’m a hell of a lot more patient. So I stopped, cleaned my screen and asked the instructor what was up.

It turns out, even if I spent two dozen hours and $9,000 worth of wasted ink I would have never gotten a satisfactory result with the normal screenprint ink. The paper I had bought was too dark for a lighter color, and had way too much tooth for the thinner ink. He told me to try fabric ink.

I was a bit incredulous, but he assured me it would work fine. This was stored separately, and I had to open a big tub of the yellow ink, which even unmixed was a bang-on match with my digital drawing that lived on my phone. It was strange, fluffy and thick. Normally, properly-prepared screenprinting ink is the consistency of melted ice cream, and I was worried it would dry out in the screen.

I grabbed a TA and asked if it was normal, and he assured me it was and wouldn't dry out as long as I added a little water. Sure enough, it came out great, nice and bright.

Better yet, my registration continued to be bang-on. I remembered from undergrad that I had much better luck registering smaller prints, whereas the ones I printed last year were always a challenge. I used tab registration and tried registering them with a piece of acetate, and it was very inconsistent and disappointing. I seem to be having great luck this year.

Anyway, I only got two colors done before clean-up time, and found out next week was Spring Break for SVA, so the studios wouldn't be open. Will I manage to visit the studio during open studio to finish the most ambitious print of my life (six whole colors!), or would I fail and have to write about picking my nose or something next week? Stay tuned, kiddos, thanks for reading!