Got Fish?

I'm taking a silkscreen class at the School of Visual Arts. This is the third class (and the first class we bought our stuff and taped our screens -- a very expensive waste of time).

Today, I revisited the "Got Fish?" idea with a photo of Snoopy taken when we were in Jakarta, Indonesia. I did the layers in Photoshop and added "Got Fish?" in the same font that the "Got Milk?" advertisement used. I tried making each layer large enough to overlap slightly, and printed four layers -- one for each color.

I put two layers on each silkscreen, since I only have two screens. I now realize that I should have put them together 1 and 3, 2 and 4, so that I didn't have to wait for the screen to dry between colors. A lot of time is eaten by waiting for your screen to dry.

The first layer is pink (just the inside of his ears). The second is a bright, light orange. The third is a dark orange, and the fourth is the black. I have yet to figure out how to line everything up perfectly. When I'm lining the screen up to the original, it looks perfect. When I push the ink through, it's obvious it's not.

I was okay with the lack of alignment until the black layer, when I tried to fix it midstream. Fixing it midstream is probably even more difficult than aligning it properly before printing, but the black ink made it impossible. Since I was already tired, I decided to clean the screen and come home. I will try to do it right next week. The question is whether I have to redo the Photoshop files to build in better overlap, or whether I just need help determining why I'm not good at getting the registration aligned.

Anyway, he's still cute.



Note: I took this with the iPhone in the studio, so the colors aren't true.