screen printing adventure

tuesday night i went to AIR (Artists Image Resource) on the north side with melissa, who's a pro at screen printing xmas cards (she does it every year). i showed up unprepared, partly because i hadn't bothered to sit down and figure out what i wanted to print and partly because i was content to observe the process, since i figured i could go back to one of their many open studios on tues and thurs from 6 to 10 p.m. anyway, i ended up doodling some things and came up with a design that i felt deserved to be printed on a couple of t-shirts and on random sheets of paper. i may use this as the starting point for my valentines next year....
the process is pretty cool - basically you draw or print a black & white image on a transparency (see mine at left) and the negative space around the opaque parts of the design are "burned" into an emulsion coated screen by exposing the screen to ultraviolet light. the areas of the emulsion that aren't hardened by the light (because they're blocked by the black parts of your design), can be rinsed out  and you're left with a stencil.  then you use a squeegee to push paint through the open areas of the screen onto whatever substrate you want. it was really fun and i want to go back again and again. more pics of the process (some stolen from melissa) are here.