Encaustic with Screen Printing

1. Encaustic with Screenprinting Intro: Hi. Welcome to my studio in Pol's Bow, Washington. My name is Dana Harris Seeger. I am a painter and a printmaker. Today I'm going to show you how to combine screen printing and encaustic painting. In this class, I want to show students how they can combine printmaking, specifically screen printing with encaustic painting. It's sometimes hard with the caustic medium to get a computer generated imagery to look really detailed and photographic. Screen printing is a really good way to do that. Combining these two is relatively simple. I will show you step by step how to use different methods to get the results that you want. 2. Getting Started: In this class, I have assumed that you already know how to screen print. You might have some screens and ready to go. You might even have some screen prints that you've already created on regular paper. Printmaking paper. I'm also going to assume that you have either taken my basic caustic workshop, that you know how to do it in caustic painting. I'm going to skip all of the preliminary details and go right into combining the different methods. In this first lesson, we are going to combine screen printing on an ecaustic painting. The first method that I'm going to show you is an indirect method. And by that I mean you're going to be taking a screen print that you've created onto a substrate such as sheer rice paper or shear fabric. And then you're going to be applying that to an existing caustic painting using ecaustic media. When we're talking about the indirect method of applying a screen print to an acoustic painting, you can either have a painting that's already got some ecustic medium on it. You can have some paint on it. It doesn't even have to be really smooth. The nice thing about this method, which is just applying a screen print to the ecoustic painting, is that it doesn't have to be perfectly smooth. It can have some texture, can have some bumps. You're not literally screen printing on the painting, It doesn't have to be smooth. I use this method a lot because I work in stages and I screen print multiple, script the same screen multiple times on different materials. It's easier for me in some ways, to print a whole bunch and then figure out how I'm going to apply them later. This method is for you if that's the way you like to work. Some things, notes about different materials. Materials that work the best are shear or translucent. This is a polyester organza which means that it's very wide weave, shear or transparent fabric. Although when you place it on the painting, it might look a little bit opaque. Once you put the wax on and adhere it to the painting, it becomes very transparent. And I'll show you that in a minute. Another material that works really well is Sumi papers, Japanese painting or drawing paper. It's like a rice paper and it's very durable, but it's also really translucent. Again, when you apply that to the encaustic painting, the wax embeds into the paper and it makes it really transparent. In fact, it's really hard to tell sometimes if the paper is even there. It's nice because without having to actually apply the screen and use different materials, you can just use your regular water based screen printing ink onto paper that you normally would print on anyway and then apply it to the painting. You can do your screen prints with four color process. You can do reduction process. All of these I've done all types of screen printing. You can even do screen print Monotype. This is a piece, a portion of a monotype on screen that I've cut out a little bit. This is a non woven fabric. It's like a stabilizer that works really well too. Anything that's shear or transparent will work. You can use a natural fiber. If it is silk or polyester, both work really well. The only difference really is the feel, But if you have access to either on either one works. I wouldn't recommend something that's like a chiffon, which can wrinkle. Sometimes tissues can get a little bit wrinkly too. I like paper and fabric that have a little bit of body to it. This organza is really nice because it has a natural stiffness. It will lay down flat when you apply it to the painting. Let's get into more detail and I'll show you how to do that. 3. Indirect Method with Fabric: Okay, I am over here with this painting. Caustic painting that has been fused. It has some collage and a little bit of caustic paint. It's pretty smooth. I'm going to take this screen print of a fan that I created. It was just a photo screen print. It is on polyester organza, which is sheer fabric. The nice thing is, even though it looks a little bit opaque, once you put the caustic medium on, it will be almost completely transparent. You can cut really close to the image that you want, or you can leave some of the fabric and you might see a little bit of that coverage, which might be nice. But for the most part, you're just going to see the image floating on the surface. What I'm going to do first is just warm up the surface of the painting because it is a little bit chilly in here. And get it little bit warm. And then I'm going to apply the medium to this fabric. I don't have to dip the fabric, I don't have to do anything to the fabric other than just place it on there and then start painting on it with the caustic medium. I'll remove this. And the same works for paper too. I'll show you what the difference is between the fabric and the paper in effect. I'm just warming that because it's nicer to apply warm and caustic medium to a warm surface. Okay. All right. So now I'm going to take my fabric and it's already a little bit stickier. I could feel that it's kind of sticking on it. So I'm going to lay down the icing about the organzas that it won't wrinkle really take a and I'm just going to start in the middle and move outward. Pretty good coding. Again, I mentioned that this is the best way if you have a painting with any kind of texture, if you're finding it hard to get a really smooth surface, this is the best way to apply a screen print. You shouldn't really see any bumps from the fabric. Is edges that are, that are folded or like a seam or something, then that's going to show up. And that might not be ideal for you, but okay, now I'm going to fuse it, let that cool off. Then I'll show you what it looks like once. It's all nice and cool. There you have it. That is process number one. You might find that you get some of these areas where the wax has either been totally absorbed by the fabric or you can feel a little bit of the fabric through it. I would just go over another coat once it's completely cooled. Because if it's still warm and you have those and you reapply, they're just going to keep getting absorbed. That just means you need another thicker coat of and caustic medium. After it's been cooled again, I'm going to wait. I'll reapply that, but you can see how transparent it has become. 4. Indirect Method with Paper: Okay, since we already did our application, this has a screen print of a grid. And I wanted to show you how I can apply it to the caustic painting. See the difference between the sheer rice paper and the fabric? I'm going to do first section here and then, I don't know, maybe I like it better there now that I put it down. Okay, let's do it like that so it's sitting on the caustic. Nice and and then same procedure. You just carefully and quickly paint the medium from the center out onto the paper. If you get all the coverage you only need to do one coat. I would let it cool again a little bit before I fused it. If you need to do another coat, you can. But remember, the more coats you put on, the less transparent it's going to be. I like to apply it pretty hot. That it just blends in nicely, you confuse mildly, it doesn't have to be super hot. 5. Making the Screen: For this next lesson, we're going to be screen printing directly onto an acoustic painting. You can either use an existing screen. Most of my screens are pretty standard. They're the aluminum frame with the monofilament, polyester sheer fabric over it. I use all kinds of methods from monotype photo emulsion to just hand painting. But I also wanted to show you a way that you could easily make a screen using some things that you probably already have if you just wanted to try this out and you weren't ready to invest in the whole light table and really expensive screens and everything, there's pretty simple ways to get started. The way that I made this very simple screen is the frame is just a mat board that I took out of a photo frame. So it's just a regular old matt board with a window cut out of it. And I took the same fabric, this polyester organza that I was using previously to screen print on, this is going to be my mesh that we squeeze through. I took a piece of the fabric that was larger than the window frame, than the mat board, and I stapled it all the way around the outside edge and tried to pull it as tight as I could, because you want it a little bit taut, but for our method, it doesn't have to be super, super tight. Then I put some tape, clear packing tape, which you probably can't see, but there's clear packing tape over the staples and a little bit to the inside of the little window pane so that there's tape over the mesh. That way ink doesn't get underneath the mat board. It just makes it less messy. Then what I did is I took a pencil and I drew a design. What I'm going to do now, I'm going to use acrylic paint and a little bit of either gel medium or mod podge mixed in. And I'm going to use that as a screen filler. You could use screen filler if you had it, but again, this is probably something that most artists have already. We're going to create the mask by painting out the negative areas. When you're doing a screen print, it's a stencil method. Cover up, whatever you block out will be white or won't print. I try to trace around. I've lifted the screen up off of the surface with these two brushes so that it doesn't drip down in. It doesn't have to be super thick. And acrylic is nice because it dries very quickly and it forms a solid coating, waterproof coating once it's dry paint on here. If you wanted to do the monotype method while the paint is still wet, you could squeegee this through. But again, this is the water based, so it's not going to adhere to your caustic painting. What you would want to do is use that oil based water sable material. The reason I used acrylic paint mostly is just so that I could see it so I knew what I was doing because the acrylic medium and the Mo page are both clear. I'm painting around the lines because the lines are what I want to print. I'm trying to be careful to leave those. Okay. Once that's dry, I can hold it up to the light and if I see any pinholes or if it's a thin spot, I can reapply the mod pogocrylic mixture. Because what I don't want is for any ink to go through an area that I don't want if there's areas that are too thick in terms of the image. If I wanted to alter anything, I could always make the image area smaller, but I can't make more image once I've covered it up, it's covered up. Once that's dry, we'll come back and I'll show you how to squeegee some ink onto an acustic painting. 6. Screen Printing materials: Welcome back for this next lesson, I'm going to show you how to take an caustic painting or a blank primed caustic panel and actually screen print on the panel. This is panel printing. In order to do that, we'll talk a little bit about materials because although the screen itself, you can use your standard screens that you probably already have or there's nothing special about the screen itself. But the materials that you want to screen print onto the wax are specific. You can't use water based materials. Your normal speed ball water based screen printing inks will not work. They will just beat up on the surface. If you've done any kind of experiments with acrylic on the wax, it doesn't work. Nothing water based is going to stick. To get around that, we can use some oil based, water soluble materials such as speed ball fabric, block printing ink. It is water soluble but it's oil based. It will stick to the painting. But you can clean your screen with water and soap, which is really nice. Because traditional oil based screen printing inks are pretty toxic. I would not recommend them. You have to clean the screen with a solvent and it's really nasty. I would recommend something that's water soluble, but oil based, this is a good one. Harbonel makes an aqua wash, etching in it. Also make block printing ink because we're screen printing, no matter what we use, we're going to have to thin it a little bit with some oil. We can't really use this etching or block printing ink straight out of the two because they're too thick. You can try and experiment with the thickness that you like, like it a little bit runnier than these etching or block printing inks are straight out of the tube. Cranfield is a British company. They also make water soluble oil based inks like this, safe wash etching. In again, I will show you how to combine some oil in order to make it easily spreadable on the screen, but the main thing is that it has to be oil based, otherwise it won't stick to your coustic. 7. Encaustic Screenprint final lesson: Okay, so here we are. We have a caustic painting, nice and smooth. It's been a little bit, few, it's super warm but it's not ice cold. I've got our little screen print. This colored section is the mask that's not going to let the water soluble oil based in, but we're going to be placing it on our caustic painting. The frame is usually whatever the thicker part of the frame is. You want to put that up so that the fabric part is as close as you can get to the surface. This technique is nice if you want it as a final element. If you want this image, the screen print to show up really bold. Because you don't need to go over it with the caustic medium like we did for the paper or the fabric print adhesion. What I'm doing here is I'm mixing up a little of the oil that's water soluble. And I just put a little oil in to make it a little bit more spreadable. Because sometimes these etching or block grinning inks can be thick. Watering it down with oil because you don't want to add water to oil based. It will thin out. This will keep the color, the density of the color, but it just makes it more less viscous. Once I have the ink the way I want it, what I think is really cool about screen printing onto any surface or painting is that you can do it and it makes the layers show through. The cool thing about caustic is that when you layer on top, you'll see the layers underneath. I'm going to place the screen print so I can see it overlapping some of the layers underneath. Like I said before, this technique works really well if it's super smooth, if you have a painting that has a little bit of bumps or an area of the painting that has some bumps and you don't want to use that and I'm going to spread the ink onto the top. You only have to go as much as wide as the image. It doesn't have to be really wider than that today. For a squeegee, I'm using this, it's like a scraper. You can use a credit card, you can use a regular, traditional squeegee for screen printing. But you just want something that's got a flattish edge that you can scrape the ink through the mesh. You want to add enough ink that you're going to be able to cover your whole image without leaving any voids. I like to add maybe more than less. Then you're just going to take your squeegee and scrape it across. If you can get it in one pass, that's great. If you notice that it didn't make it all the way through, then you could do it one more time. But I just lifted it up after I squeezed it. And you can see that now I have an image. If there's a part on it that came through, you can check underneath and see if there's a spot. If there is, I can always go back and put tape on that section and make sure that it doesn't come through. Again, if that's important. At this point though, I would not put any more paint or caustic medium over the surface because it will blend, it will smear, and you'll get very interesting textures. That is the direct screen caustic painting method. Then when you're ready to clean up your screen, I just scrape back in the leftover ink into a container or throw it away. Then you can wash this while it's still wet in the sink with soap and water. Same with your little squeegee. You can wipe that off and then. There's any residue, you can just rape it off. But the cool thing about screen printing also, any printmaking method, is that while you have the screen and the ink with the screen, you can go ahead and screen print this many times over. If you have paintings that you want to do more onto or if you wanted to do it on say, a piece of fabric or paper for later, you could do that too. I could set this painting aside, I could put image down on my paper and I can do the same thing. I could put the ink back on top. I can take my little squeegee, well now I have the print on paper print away. And then you can either adhere this to the painting or you can squeegee your ink right on the painting. Now, we can come back in if we want to in an area and do our screen print. If you're going to use a large screen or one that stretched really tightly and you're not going to put the frame directly on the encaustic painting, it's going to run off in any way. I would recommend having some support on the sides that it's going to run off. If I was going to say, put this screen print here and the frame is part of the surface, the substrate. I don't want the fabric falling off and risking getting punctured or anything like that. What I'm trying to say is that you need some support on the sides around your piece that you're screen printing onto. If and when you run the piece of, for instance, if I was going to put, just wipe that off. If I was going to screen print this onto this part right here, but I wanted it to run off, Then I have this supported surface that's about the same height, that way when I put this screen down, it has something to support it. It's not just going to fall off and the fabric is not going to get torn. I'm going to take my squeegee just like before. I'm going to press down. You can see where it, how it kind of bumped off of the, how it bumped onto, I guess the painting. The more you can have it be supported evenly, the smoother that transition will be. There you go. There's a print that's been run off the edge. 8. Encaustic with Screenprint end screen: Thank you so much for taking this screen printing with caustic online class. I'm very excited to see what you create with caustic and screen printing. Don't forget to post your projects in the project area. You can ask me any questions in the discussion area. I'd be happy to answer questions or help you out with anything caustic related. If you need more caustic goodness, don't forget to take more of my skill share classes. Be.