Adult Print Workshop - Deconstructed Screen Printing

Many, many years ago, when I first started to screen print,  I learned this simple mono printing technique:  

First you draw on the screen with oil pastels and then you print through this with a solvent based binder.  

The  pastels would initially resist the ink and then gradually they would dissolve in the binder and print through onto the paper.  Although you got several prints, every print was different.  

I'm pleased to say that nowadays I print on fabrics with water based fabric inks. This makes screen printing so much less vaporous!

I also sometimes like to use thickened dyes. This opens the door to a whole other way of printing- which connects back to the oil pastel thing.  

Enter - the wonderful world of 'deconstructed screen printing'!  

This technique was developed by  Kerr Grabowski   Not only does she make really beautiful fabrics, but she is very generous in teaching her technique. I first learned how to do this through her DVD which I see is sadly out of print. But, the good news is that she is currently developing a download version.  Let's hope that will be available soon.

If you like serendipitous outcomes and textural prints this is a really exciting way to screen print onto cloth.

So, here are some pictures of students  work from the deconstructed screen print workshop we did  last week.  I think they speak for themselves:

 All work is by members of Stitch Wild Creative Embroidery Group and I can't wait to see how they develop these into stitch.

There were so many fab prints that I've amalgamated them into these groups so I can show more of them.