Snoopy background and making a screen!

To start off with, here is a background I came up for Snoopy's next project. It is going to be a mother's day gift for his mum and will feature his smiling face flanked by his two dogs.

This painting has a twin yet to be sanded and color washed, so if you don't think this one is the right color scheme we can go with the other one! I just got carried away and went with what seemed to be working!




Also, some tangible progress on my photo emulsion screen printing project! The first part of making a screen is coming up with an image. If you look back at my last couple of posts, you can see that I came up with a whole bunch of them!

Next, you must make a film positive. I initially tried doing this on my home printer w/ some wet media film but that did not work out so well. So, $7 and a trip to Staples later I have a stack of perfectly printed film positives ready to use.

Here they are all hung up on my wall:



And here is my ever-so-popular "Splitty Dash" painting in its film positive format. (it happens to be leaning against Snoopy's painting) This was todays focus:



The next step in making the screen is messy and done entirely in the dark, so I don't have any pictures of it. It involves prepping the screen by coating it w/ the sensitized photo emulsion and drying it in completely void of UV light. To me, this meant no light... but now it means under a yellow "bug light" since i gave in and bought one today. Insects don't see yellow bug lights since they lack the UV spectrum. It is for this reason that they work well for my dark room. I can see, but my sensitized screen can not. :D

After everything has dried sufficiently, it's time to expose the screen! I did this by first placing a black sheet of card stock down on my work surface. The black does not reflect light, so it works well as a backdrop for this step. Next, I sandwiched the film positive (face down) between my sensitized screen and a sheet of glass. The glass allows light to pass through and does a good job of keeping the positive in place. Then I set my egg timer and turn on my 500w photo flood light. This bulb is ridiculously bright and should develop a screen in about 20-30 minutes depending on several factors. Here is what all that looks like in action!



After the allotted time, I turned off the light and brought my now exposed screen to the sink where I >VERY CAREFULLY< rinsed it out to expose the negative. I actually screwed this up twice and had to re-do the above process three times today! AAAAH! Oh well, you can't learn this stuff without screwing up a lot! You must stay positive! (pun intended, lol)

So here it is all dry and taped up! I did lose some tiny details and couldn't get the screen entirely clear, but it is satisfactory for now. We will see how it prints tomorrow!


Next up, bug dash!