Missing a step in my method

[dustin]

Alright, so I'm hoping that someone may know a bit about what I'd like to achieve and then possibly set me in the right direction.

Backstory to my situation is that I've got a studio room downtown in my city that I'm renting out, and it's bleeding money! So what I wanted to do was find some way to start generating money out of it to at least keep it afloat...its a space that I enjoy renting. My studiomate has done printing in her past, so what I wanted to do was print up cheap posters using mostly the equipment that we have...so that I don't need to invest more money into something that may not take off! Right now, I've got my amateur-ish darkroom in a large used-to-be science area with a sink. I don't know the exact dimensions of the room, or the larger room that contains it, but I'm not really short on space.

I've been doing a bit of research on the topic of printing (Without using computers and xerox machines...where's the fun in that), and from what I gather, I can achieve what I want to do in one of two ways:

1) Silk screening- but I'm not sure how to get a photo onto a silk screen...something about halftones. My assumption was that one would put a halftone down over the screen and have a negative up in your enlarger. I think I may be wrong about this as you need a positive image and it should be solid and vacuum sealed to the halftone.

2) Something similar to a newspaper press where I would paste the layout of my poster up, photograph it, and enlarge the negative onto a surface which could be inked and stamped onto the poster paper.


So both methods could end up being totally wrong...any guidance on this gap in my process would help me a lot!

[mickeyobe]

dustin,

There is a wealth of material here.

www.google.ca/search?q=Silk+Screen&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Mickey

[dustin]

While I had done a bit of research before, this time I actually turned something up.

Has anyone had experience transferring a photo to glass using gel medium or acetone? Would the quality be acceptable to make a half-toned screen?

[mickeyobe]

Apr 24, 2011 12:19:43 GMT -5 dustin said:

While I had done a bit of research before, this time I actually turned something up.

Has anyone had experience transferring a photo to glass using gel medium or acetone? Would the quality be acceptable to make a half-toned screen?

Dustin,

I have never, personally, made 1/2 tones but I think the number of dots per square inch is determined by the kind of medium upon which the the photo is to be printed and the distance at which it will be viewed. It's been a long time but I recall that newsprint only required 65 dpi whereas a glossy coated stock magazine would demand a much higher screen count.
If the quality of the original photo is good and the print medium is high quality I should think a higher dpi count would be wanted.

My only silk screen experience occurred years ago when i volunteered to work for a political election candidate. I wound up in his silk screen printing room until I was driven out by the smell. I served the rest of my voluntary time hammering the printed signs into front lawns. Perhaps the process smells better now.

Mickey

[Deleted]

Offset newspaper halftones started out at 65 lines per inch and later 85 lines became pretty standard. It is difficult to use a finer screen because newsprint is porous and the ink in one dot bleeds into the adjacent dot. On higher quality paper, usually coated stock the screens could go up to about 220 lines per inch.We made halftones using an enlarger. The paper for the print was laid on a vacuum easel and the screen--made of a plastic material was laid over the paper. Then the screen was sucked down flat by a vacuum pump. Exposures were relatively long because the light was projected through the scree, which had a tint sort of like polarized sun glasses. The screens were expensive and very easy to damage. That was the process for making a black and white halftone. Making a color separation was a lot more complicated and time consuming.

There was considerable skill involved in making good screen prints. Nowadays pages complete with photos and text are just laid out on the computer and sent directly to plate--the software takes care of the screening.

Wayne

[colray]

I would even think about using halftone in 'print yourself silk screen' but I would look at making tone dropouts at deferent density's and then print the posters as duotone .Col