In Situ Silk Screening

I am an artist. And I’m a teacher. So occasionally I’ll post a practical entry. This is one of those times:

I did some designs for a friend of mine who is a DJ (the One Drop Sound System), and we made some shirts. Nothing unusual there. Some time later, he was hosting a charity concert/artisan show/performance art event and, of course, there was more talk of t-shirts. Wouldn’t it be great, we pondered, if we could print shirts there at the show? I’ve always been a firm believer that anything kinetic draws a crowd, and this way, I wouldn’t have any unsold stock left over. It got the wheels turnin’, anyway.

With silk screening (at least using photosensitive emulsion), electricity is only necessary when preparing a screen and “curing” (setting ink with heat) the final product. And if it’s dark, light helps. So, yes, I’d need an outlet, but only for a lamp and a heat gun, but I’d forego the exposure box (for setting screens). As for water, yes, it is necessary. But not much. If I kept one bucket of clean water for cleaning my sponges, I could set up my slop sink and use it for wastewater & cleaning my plastic spatulas, squeegees & dirty sponges. All told, I’d need about six gallons, max.

The rest is in the preplanning: I’d need the aforementioned sponges, spatulas, squeegees, some clean towels, a drying rack, inks (with extra jars for mixing colors on the spot) and shirts. Of course, I’d already fitted a collapsable drafting table with my screen hinges. So the only caveat would be that I’d have to prepare the screens in advance, so I crammed as many images of varying sizes onto my ten screens as I could, including the event logos, my friend’s logos and some other fun designs and packed it all into the truck. With water-based inks, I was feeling as environmentally-friendly and carbon neutral as I could be.

And it actually worked.

There were, of course, certain problems. As that it was the wettest summer in living memory, things were not drying at all quickly, and I’m sure my instructions to run the shirts through the dryer when people got home fell on many a deaf ear, and images faded (I know this because people sought me out afterwards to remedy this problem...). Could I, I would put a dryer in my truck bed, but alas, I could not.

I charged shirt + image. Each image (based on size) cost a different amount, and multiples were encouraged. My favorite ones were when somebody chose a few images they liked, gave me $25 (my cap on pricing) and said “go nuts.” If people brought their own clothing, they saved on a shirt. People were literally pulling the shirts off their backs and I felt like a street performer. It was a grand old time, and I repeated it at a few craft shows.

So these, for any ambitious printmakers who’d like to try out In Situ Silk Screening, are the basics. It’s amazing how much a process can be pared down when we look at the real essence of it. Maybe that’s the underlying moral of this whole essay. Commercial printers would have scoffed (and did) to see me work: registration by eye, screening over wet ink, mixing colors on the screen (on the fly), but I’ve never enjoyed screening more. I couldn’t care less what offends the sensibilities of commercial printers. Art has always been a social endeavor to me, and being able to move my studio outdoors was more fun that should be allowed.

For that same event (being the obsessively prepared person I am), I contracted out a bunch of concert tees to have at the ready. His processes were too rigid for him to adjust to the humidity and all his screens failed. Not that I’m bragging (and I hope it doesn’t sound like I am), but having taken the time to learn the chemistry and the mechanics of all the aspects of the process gave me the flexibility to pull off this whole escapade. I’ve heard a true craftsman never blames his tools, and I can get behind that.