Exposure

I continued the process of development of the screens for printing. Below are pictures of the process of exposing the screen. I exposed the images for ~45 minutes each using a 150W incandescent light bulb. The screens were positioned about one foot below the light bulbs. Images were printed to transparencies first, laid on to the photo-emulsion coated screen, and covered with a pane of glass to hold the transparency tight to the screen.

A view of the setup. I'm using a plant grow station and the strong, 150W light bulbs that it uses. Notice that the rest of the room is dark.

This is a close up of the screen as it is being exposed. In this case I have two transparencies aligned to make a larger image. There are two pieces of glass because I did not have one large enough to cover the entire image. The seam where the panes of glass meet did not create an unexposed area.

UPDATE (26 May 2011): I made a rookie mistake which I will hopefully never make again. notice that the image has been exposed to read correctly "HSK." Problem: as exposed, the image would repeatedly print the mirror image of "HSK." This has since been remedied. I pulled off the tape, popped out the screen and reversed it, reinserted the spine, re-taped it and voila--good as gold. It's now ready for a production run of T-shirts next Wednesday.

The unexposed/shielded/blocked areas have been washed of the photo-emulsion. I found that using a gentle scrubbing motion with a semi-soft toothbrush worked well. I needed to scrub both sides of the screen on the unexposed areas to remove all of the unexposed photo-emulsion. The larger screen was more difficult and tedious because of all the tiny detail, but it will pay off when I print with it. On a side note, I might need to re-tape the screens and coat them with polyurethane....

The plan, now, is to print the images. I have a total of three screen ready for printing and hope to print two T-shirts (to wear to a music festival this coming weekend) and to try the larger image on a piece of paper. Now that I'm feeling much more comfortable with this process involving photo-emulsion, I hope to soon try this using a drawing fluid which can be used to draw directly onto the screens.