Screen Printing at Print Club London

I attended a screen printing workshop at Print Club London in Dalston today. It was brilliant! The team (Oli, Beks & Sophia) at the studios are so friendly and experienced. They explain the whole process of screen printing from design to print with a bit of banter thrown in for good measure.

I selected a design that I have etched a couple of years ago because I love the texture and pattern.

There were about 13 people on the course and we split into groups to help each other print our designs as the process is quite labour intensive and required speedy change overs so we all got a chance to print.

Designs laid out on the paper to help aline the screen onto the paper

Gorgeous coloured printing inks!

Preparing the screen with brown tape to seal any exposed silk-screen before printing

My screen ready to print!

Cleaned screens drying outside

To test the screen you use up discarded / rejected prints from the studio. I really love the layering of screen prints so I selected some cool rejects and cut them to size. Here is a selection of my prints.

It has been a long time since I did screen printing at art college and I had forgotten how much fun it is! I would definitely like to get back into screen-printing and would love to return to the Print Club London again.

Check out lots of other cool crafty blogs at #handmademonday organised by Julia of Sum of their Stories.

Palace Art Fair 16th May

The Palace Art Fair is an annual event that showcases local artists, designers and crafts people. There are stalls and exhibitions of loads of very talented people - including Blaze and Mel from the Putney School of Art etching class had entered the Fulham Palace Art Fair and exhibited their work on a stall together - their work looked absolutely brilliant and I think they sold quite a few prints between them! Nice work there girls...

I met up with Louise (from etching) before the Private View and had a lovely cup of tea and chat and we wondered down to Fulham Palace to see the girls - some sections of this building date back to the 700's!!

We all had a lovely evening and I really enjoyed seeing Blaze and Mel's work look so professional in their section of the exhibition.

Private View November 2012

The Private View was really great last night. We had quite a lot of visitors and the place was fairly busy for most of the evening. I was very happy with the framing of my skull doodle etch and the patterned zig-zag. I used the framers in Putney on Disraeli Road opposite the library.

Here are a few photos from the event.

My Skull doodle and Pattern zig-zag hanging in the exhibition.

Blaze Cyan's work

Marcella and her friend look at Melanie Bellis' work on the first staircase. 

Nibbles, chat and bubbles flowing freely.

Etching Exhibition 2012

The etching class that I attend at the Putney School of Art has organised an exhibition of our prints from the 5th November to 14th November 2012.

The Private View is on Friday 9th November at the Putney School of Art from 18:45 - 20:45. Nibbles and drinks are available to all who turn up to see the work.

Hope to see you there!

Etchings from Summer School 2012

I attended a three day etching workshop at the Putney School of Art during the last few days of July 2012.


The tutor was Chris Roantree, a graduate of the Royal College of Art whose work is really surreal and a little bit spooky - very cool!
There is an example of Chris' work on the left so you can decide for yourselves what you think.



My work is not really like Chris' style but I was influenced to take a more creative approach to my etchings by adding more imagery and darker more subversive elements to my work.

The plate below took me two days to develop.

Day One
I started with a hard-ground free style sketch then added texture using soft-ground.
I placed objects like crumpled tin-foil, clingfilm, rubber bands and bubble wrap ontop of sections of the plate to create the textures you can see in the work.

Day Two
I added tone by aqua-tinting the plate and building up to the darkest tones by leaving them exposed to the nitric acid the longest.
Timings for the aqua-tint tones were:
Soft grey: 30 seconds
Mid grey: 45 seconds
Dark grey: 60 seconds
Black: 90 seconds

The red section you see on the skull was created by using a technique called Chin-colle