Here Come the Hiccups

You know, you’d think after 9 months of projects, I would have realized that things are going to take 300x longer than I expected them to. Screen printing is no different. So here we are, 1:30am and I think I’m throwing in the towel until tomorrow.

I was planning to have the artwork printed and burned on the screen tonight, but of course the film didn’t work on my printer (see example A below)… instead it beaded up into fabulously unusable gobs all over the film… gobs that still – after 3 hours – are mocking me in their happy moist state.

In the interest of making my deadline, I decided to just redraw my art on a new piece of film with an archival ink pen instead of waiting to get it printed somewhere tomorrow. Of course the only pen I could find in my art supplies was the SMALLEST point size known to man. Of course. So a few hours of tedious coloring later, I’m about to burn to the screens and realize that there are no guidelines for exposure time. You’d think this would be a pretty calculated thing, size of screen + wattage of light x distance of light from screen, etc… but apparently for some unknown reason this isn’t how it works. So now, I need to run a test screen to find out my exposure time, and then strip that and recoat the screen and reburn my artwork.

*sigh* I suppose that’s what I get for poor planning in advance. Oh well, tomorrow is a new day – a day that hopefully will end a finished screen-printed project.