Fine Art Screen Printing Techniques

A guide to screen printing as a supremely accessible art.

Fine art screen printing techniques.

Both warhol and rauschenberg extended the technique by screen printing a design onto a canvas to serve as the basis of a painting. Screen printing may be adapted to printing on a variety of materials from paper cloth and canvas to rubber glass and metal. The stenciled image blocks the ink on the other side to create the image. Something you cannot achieve with reproductions.

Art league instructor nancy mcintyre demonstrates techniques for silk screen printing with block out stencils including tips on registration marks and mixin. The resulting fine prints impressions while not original in the sense of a fine art painting or drawing are considered nevertheless to be works of art in their own right even though they exist in multiples. The pop art leader andy warhol had a background in commercial art which gave him a particular affinity with the technique of screen printing. Artists have used the technique to print on bottles on slabs of granite directly onto walls and to reproduce images on textiles which would distort under pressure from printing presses.

Originally this was either a metal plate engraved in intaglio or a wood block or metal plate cut in relief. It remains to be seen whether the latest fine printing techniques alter this assessment. The mesh was sometimes made from silk which led to the technique s alternative name silk screen printing. From the beginning of the nineteenth century lithographic stones were included and today screen printing ads are a further type of printing element.

A fine art print is a multiple original made by hand one impression at a time from a plate usually wood copper zinc or in this case amberlith film etched or carved by the artist with original fine art prints the tactile quality of the ink on paper and the printing style are inseparable parts of the artwork. Originally based on a hand stenciling method the process soon evolved into using fine mesh stretched over a frame. Woodcuts are a subset of relief printmaking where you carve out negative space from a surface leaving only the lines and shapes that you want to appear in the print. The earliest recognizable form of screen printing appeared more than 1 000 years ago in china during the song dynasty.

The image obtained from any printing element. If there is ever an arena where the printmaker is able to play and experiment it is for sure with the screen printing technique allowing a diverse range of surfaces for production and with it breaking up the border between the consumerism arena and the bubble of fine art editions screen prints also known as silkscreens since their big entrance to the world of art in 1960 s are continuing.