This month I have started a new (for me) evening class at Edinburgh Printmakers, an open access studio dedicated to the practice of fine art printing, and one of my favourite places.
I’m a great believer in the continuation of learning, every day is a school day and knowledge is confidence building and the sense of achievement you get from learning a new skill is a great thing.
So in continuation of my new course every year I am now trying Screen printing. Last year I enrolled in a 6 week evening class at EP learning the basics of stone lithography. Although I enjoyed the results I thought the process was a little more time consuming and so was steered towards screen printing.
So far so good.
The first week was all about deciding what to draw, or print. I took along one of my sketch books and used a previous watercolour drawing from the Water of Leith walkway, see the original, which was coincidentally created almost a year ago to the day, below.
First I had to create the seperations, picking 4 colours to create a representation of the above. The tricky part was drawing each colour or layer in black ink. Once complete we were ready to mix our colours and prepare the screen for printing.
This week we printed our first three colours, letting each one dry before adding the next colour. Making mistakes and corrections as we went I feel like we are learning lots by getting messy.
Next week we will add the final black layer, the detailed line drawing which should bring the piece together. Fingers crossed!