Whew, its all over. After a whirlwind week of design and partisan-ing the seas, Kendrick from Halftone Def Studios and I (Sean) spent all day Saturday printing our lovely little poster collaboration. What follows is a chronologically out of order, but sensibly ordered visual description of what we did! Enjoy:
It all starts with baby oil.
We place a cheap paper printout of one color separation on our exposure table. It is then sprayed with the oil.
The baby oil is thoroughly rubbed into the print. This makes it the paper translucent, easier for the light to get through.
Using a squeegee, any air bubbles are pushed out. Flatter is better.
An emulsion coated screen (totally forgot to document that part) is placed on top of the oiled positive. Note that we only coated half the screen here because our image on this color (the silver octopus!) was small enough to not cover the whole screen. So we saved some emulsion! You can also kind of see the positive through the emulsion.
The screen is covered in a black cloth, a large piece of upholsters foam (to even out any weight) and then weighed down with some heavy wood and some Communication Arts magazines for good measure. This ensures the screen will be firmly pressed against the image on the glass. Sharp lines, fine details = awesome.
Turn on the exposure lights. We turn it off in about 8 minutes. This cooks the emulsion, but leaves the black areas of our positive uncooked, easily washed out.
After we take all the weight off, I run the screen upstairs to our washout sink.
With a spray nozzle attached to a hose and some horrible posture to boot, I wash the areas that didn’t cook out of the screen.
Here’s a couple of washed out screens. The ink will pass through the “clear” areas onto our paper. Simple!
Then we mix up some water-based inks…in this case tasty metallic silver.
Here’s where we skip a few more steps. The screen is registered with the paper on specialty clamps that will move up and down on a hinge and hold the screen in place at the same time. Some ink is poured in a line on the screen and we pass the ink through the screen and onto the paper with a squeegee. Kendrick “romps on it” below.
Uh oh! White ink is a bitch, plain and simple. If you let it sit on the screen too long, like if you’re trying to pinpoint register a light color on dark paper, it dries up in the mesh of the screen REALLY fast. Kendrick gets up close and cleans it out with a damp paper towel below.
Once the run of that particular color is done, we reclaim our screen. That is, using a special chemical that breaks down emulsion, we clean out the emulsion from the screen, making it reusable a bunch of times!
Since we didn’t have a pressure washer (which is ideal for this part), Kendrick got in there with the super jet spray on the hose and got some stubborn areas out.
And finally, we have a finished print! She ended up as a 3-color poster with metallic black, metallic silver and white inks on some lovely flat black paper.
and some details:
And that’s how we do it every time! We learn something new with each poster, and they all have their little disasters. Thankfully, working with a partner drastically helps with troubleshooting and paper moving. Now you can try it if you want! Be warned, this will take a long time to become a profitable hobby. I’m not sure we barely break even. But that’s fine by us (for now) because we sincerely love what we do.
The show was amazing. Against Me! killed it and their tour manager was totally cool about the posters…got a couple signed for us even! The kids seemed to enjoy the posters and great times were had by all. Always thanks to Ryan and his incredible staff at Café Eleven, the band for being so crazy good, and our best friends in the world Halftone Def Studios: romping the shit out of it since 2007. Their drive and skill helped us pump this poster out in a week.
Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn!
We’ve got a few one of these posters left over in our shop, and Halftone Def should have a few up in their shop before too long as well.
Stay tuned for more updates, some new prints for sale, and more and more and more posterzzzzzzzzzzz. Hope you learned something today!
-D&P
That poster is SIIIIIICK. You guys are wicked talented! BOUGHT.
That is the coolest!!! I had no idea making posters was such a lesson in chemistry. Ah, the meeting of science and art. It’s a beautiful thing.
freakin sweet.
really nice work…I hope to be able to lurk around the next demo you and Barbara Nasty do….looks like a very cool, satisfying process.
metallic black on matte black is fresh.
sweet design fellas. I did some work and printed on Vellum paper and the paper just didnt seem as transparent as I want it(i got my screen print deal set up and am getting ready to try it out). Thanks for posting this up, im gonna try a lil baby oil to make it more transparent and see if that looks a lot better. Ill let ya know how my first atempt since high school works out!-B.
that is one slick poster.
i noticed you’ve got a homemade exposure unit, to boot.
i’m weighing building vs. buying one, have any advice or how you rigged that one?
-j
@jackson, thanks for the compliment! nice to meet you.
build it. all the way.
the only foreseeable benefit to buying one as a newbie to printing would be your exposure time. a pro setup will cost you a whole lot of dollars and get the job done in a minute or 2. this setup is waaay cheaper (we spent about $100 total) and takes just about 8 minutes to burn our screens.
2(two) 500-watt shop lights (15 bucks at Home Depot) are suspended about 2 feet under a piece of glass (ours was a 2×3 foot glass table top that Tim had lying around). 2×4’s make up the structure. the lights plug into a power strip and boom, you have a switch. A stopwatch or kitchen timer proves to be an excellent device with which to keep time. you could get fancy and plug the lights into one of those photographic timers if you wanted to.
easy!
Great lesson!!