Reading Week - Day 3

Today I made some screen prints in a four colour separation as I was making my Lino. A few weeks ago when in the print room I realised that making work is so much more efficient when you have something to do as a filler task, other wise too much time is wasted on waiting. I applied this work ethic to today, I knew that waiting for my screens to dry and waiting for the printing beds to be available would take a while, so I continued cutting the layers of the lino when waiting.

I decided to make a screen with four colour separation so that it would help me understand colour slightly better. I learnt much more than I originally thought I was going to!

First off when making a print with a four colour separation you need to mix the inks, but perfectly. I normally guess the levels of ink and binder when preparing my colours. With a four colour separation you can't do this, all four colours need to be of the same level so that they can perfectly sit over the top of one another. You need 50g of system 3 acrylic paint (in cyan, magenta, yellow and black) and 100g of binder. This should make up a whole pot of ink. I managed to make much less that this at first because the scales were set to pounds! But we worked it out and no ink was wasted :)

Above is a small section of one of my prints that went wrong because it wasn't aligned correctly. I am not going to use it for my print elective because of this but it is a really good example of how the ink lay over each other to make different colours.