Silk screen covers

I’ve been teasing my next book titled Hot Rats on instagram for a while now. While the layout is 99% ready, I haven’t found a printer for it. I think I’ll just wait for the repair of the Risograph machine at the university workshop. Meanwhile I printed the covers and I’m also planning to do a limited run of a collector’s edition book. That will be done entirely on silk screen. The edition will be anything between 1 to 10 depending on how many useable copies I’m able to print. But now onto the bread and butter of today’s post

The screen was coated once with emulsion on both sides, so called 1+1 coating. The positive was printed at university printlab. I prepared the file as a bitmap in photoshop. So first you turn the grayscale mode on, then you move to bitmap mode. It will merge all the layers and split your image into pure black and pure white depending on the threshold you’ve set. In my case 50%. This creates an extremely hard contrast image with no halftone raster needed for silk screen.

For the ink I found a leftover can of purple mixed by a previous student. I tested it on white and black papers but wasn’t satisfied. I mixed a big portion of neon pink and then I was happy with the test print. The inks are Sebastar. The paper is Hahnemüle Ingres, as we finns call it “pariisinpaperi”. It’s an 120gsm rough textured paper available in many colours. Initially I had problems with the paper sticking to the screen despite the vacuum table. This were sorted out in two steps. The height of the screen was increased. Then when printing I lifted the screen before doing the overpass where the ink is spread again on the screen ready for the next print. I had a high success rate this way. The added neon ink was bold enough that only one pass per print was needed

Some test prints

And the resulting cover cut to size and bound to the last dummy book