I started these prints with a drawing I did a few years ago in Baltimore. The drawing is Conte crayon on mylar which is quite delicate. I took a hi-res digital photo and vectorized it in Illustrator. I reduced the colors so there were only about half a dozen different colors. Then I took each color and pasted it to a new layer. I often combine layers to get the colors to overlap the way I want. Flatbed printer is a brand new digital product on the market. We always called it digital flatbed printer. You can choose the screen print if you like. Screen printing is a printing technology which is widely used. So does the screen printer.
Overlapping transparent colors is a key component to my work. Overlapping colors produces new color combinations and unexpected results. If you use three colors, red, blue, and yellow, you can get nine color combinations including the original colors, orange, green, purple and a neutral brown or gray color made by overlapping all three. I typically use at least 10 overlapping colors, which produces a huge variety of color combinations and makes for an incredibly complex composition. I often add more colors and stencils as I go along, because it is difficult to predict the outcome beforehand. In fact I work more like a painter slowly building the composition as I go along than the typical screen printer working in a more graphic style. By overlapping several layers of transparent colors I am able to build a color that has a greater depth, similar to the old master painters of the Renaissance.
This piece is seven (on the edition) to eight stencils (on a handful of variations), each transfered to a fine mesh polyester screen (silk was originally used, hence the term silk screen). To make each stencil I printed each color using only black ink onto a transparency on an ink-jet printer. On five of the transparencies I taped a piece of translucent mylar on top to draw on with India ink. I also scratched and sanded some of the ink off the ink-jet transparencies to add texture. The two pieces of translucent film were stacked and exposed onto a screen coated with light sensitive emulsion, then rinsed so the emulsion that was blocked from the light by the black ink rinsed out and created an opening in the stencil. Everywhere that the light got through set the emulsion onto the screen, making a waterproof stencil.
Each set of transparencies were applied or burned onto a screen and lined up carefully with the previous layers of ink on the paper, then ink was forced through the stencils in one swipe using a squeegee. The pattern of the background is from another photo I took of a tile mosaic on the outside of a building. I did quite a bit of experimenting with different color combinations so I have a relatively large number of variations (30) compared to the edition size of 36 prints.
Part of the difficulty in working with layers of transparent colors is that each color is influenced by both the layers of color underneath it as well as the colors on top of it. It is usually difficult to gauge how the first color is going to look after I put on the last color. Because of this I often print a few with a couple different colors, then print a few more stencils with a couple different colors, then go back and adjust the first color based on how it is going to look with the other colors on top. I try to make each color stand on its own, but sometimes they just get lost under all the other colors. Regardless each layer adds to the color depth, whether or not it stands out. Because of the subtleties of the colors, often at first glance my prints look like they contain less colors than they do. Some stencils are printed multiple times in different orders with different inks.