A lot has happened since the last update:

Three of the Bombyx-guys have now left Trondheim, we are moving to London to get our BA in Graphic Design. Kent will be staying behind in Norway, studying Motion Design at NKF.

Before we left Trondheim, we sadly had to pack up our equipment and move out of our previous office/workshop, since it was being converted to a classroom this fall. Unfortunate, since we had little warning of this fact and didn’t have time to find a new space before we left. For now the Bombyx HQ’s content is stashed away at NKF, hopefully, they’ll be interested in keeping us around in the future, and we’ll be able to find a new space that suits our needs. We have spoken about doing a workshop at NKF for illustration and/or graphic design students this fall, hopefully that will come through as well.

We all want to be able to put out cool stuff. For ourselves, our friends and our colleagues, but for now, Bombyx has had to do like the silkworm, retreat into our cocoon for a while to grow. We’ll try our best to come to a solution that works for all parties involved, and we’ll keep updating the site as soon as we know more.

In other news, the shop is taken down for now, since it is summertime and we don’t have time or space to keep it up. The stockpile of printed goods is now with the individual artists, so if you are interested in any items, shoot a mail to us at mail@bombyx.no and we’ll get back to you asap.

Also, when I have time I’ll try to upload a few photos of the last few things we did before the holidays, including a book on our project, several shirts for clients and some other bits and pieces for ourselves. =)

-Kim

Not only are our first art-prints available in the shop, but T-shirts are also on their way and *should* be up within the day… =) To see pictures of the process, I advise you to click on our flickr-icon to the left. Feel free to comment aswell =)

In other news, we are now done with the actual semester-length assignment that fueled Bombyx, however, we’ve had way to much fun to let it lie. For the next week, we’ll be finishing up our NKF-assignments, and then we’ll be open for suggestions until NKF closes for the summer.

Since me, Knut and Martin are going over to England and further studies in London this fall, Kent will be left alone in Trondheim. He is moving onto Motion Graphics studies at NKF, and hopefully he’ll be keeping our equipment busy with fun projects. While we’ve yet to clear up the exact details on how we’ll do things, we’ll try to keep pumping out cool stuff…

-Kim

So, last week was busy, we were turning in our last regular assignment at NKF on Friday and we had three three-color and one two-color prints to get done. Still, we managed to pull through, even if we had to finish up the last color on Knut’s poster the following Monday. =)
So here they are, the four posters we did these last two weeks. We learnt a lot doing these and we can’t wait to be able to focus on printing in the upcoming weeks, t-shirts coming up next!

We’ll put these prints up for sale, prices won’t be intimidating. So if you see something you like, or maybe you just want to support some upstart printmakers, you can have your very own Bombyx original on your wall, haha. =)

I’ll be posting process pics soon.

(BTW, those are uncut posters and will be slightly trimmed =))

Our first series off prints have gotten of the ground. We’re all working around a common theme. This time, the theme was “perspective” and just like our three color registration print, we got four very different results. This first theme will result in 3 three-color designs and one two-color poster. We got Kent’s poster done already and got through two of three colors on mine, the rest will be done friday and saturday if everything goes to plan.
They’ll all be released this weekend, in runs of 40-50 posters, signed and numbered. Available both online and at our office at dates and times to be specified later. That way, you’ll be able to support us and get yourself some cool, handmade art-prints both at the same time! =)

Yesterday was spent printing up the artwork we did thursday. The point of this print was to practice multicolor registration, but also to visualize that we are four guys with differing styles.

This print was another big step up in workload for us. 100-120 prints, three colors each… with screen cleaning and reclaiming inbetween. Check out our process.


First we checked out if our positives lined up… No registration marks.
Then we mixed our first color and got to work, a lot of running, pulling and washing ahead.
Registering our second color, thank god for our press…

And then, after hours of pulling, washing, drying… our finished print. Some issues, but these mostly come down to us being sloppy, haha.

Today we are beginning our first individual designs, they will be printed next week and if you keep checking in we’ll keep you posted.

This thursday, we had some spare time on our hands, so wednesday we decided to have a workshop the next day, to try multicolor-registration… and just when we have our schedule filled to the brim with design, pre-press, positives, exposure, washing, drying, printing, pressing, printing again reclaiming etc., our friends from Villustrasjon (Wildustration, if you will) came bursting in…

We asked them the other day if maybe they wanted us to print them some posters, which turned out to be an offer they couldn’t refuse.

 
Villustrasjon are three fellow students who love to draw, drink and eat hot-dogs… in that order. Since they have big aspirations, like us Bombyx folks, they decided they needed to get themselves another excuse to hang out and have fun, so Villustrasjon was born.

Stein and Øyvind dropped by with the illustration they wanted and a small stack of paper, we got the film printed, exposed our screen and got to work. No more house-paint this time, back to good, old solvent based ink and goodbye to wrinkled paper for now.
Kent taping off the non-stencil part of the screen…
Martin on squeegee-duty, while Kent is the designated print-runner.

We printed until we ran out of the paper the guys gave us, which wasn’t too long really, clocked in at 25 posters, A2 sized, single color.
It was our first print using someone else’s design and it shows that you can run into problems when the guys doing the art isn’t too familiar with the limitations of the process, at least of our limitation, haha. Some of the finer lines were too thin to make it, but all in all the posters looked great. To wrap things up, we pulled a few prints on cloth just to see how it would look printed on a t-shirt, perhaps we’ll have to do a run of Villustrasjon-shirts soon? =)

So, we had thrown up some posters, what to do next? Business-cards obviously, lots of them, LOTS! We printed 50 sheets of 16 cards, for a total of 800 cards, sadly, we got some failed prints… 

…remember kids, always keep moving when printing with water-based house-paint to avoid drying, haha. Still most were perfect, take a look at the process.


Aaah, look at the lovely type, not to mention our fancy titles! =) We had some more people drop by to figure out what the hell we are doing. This is Nina in the back, checking out our press and Knut tightening the MacGyver-clamps…

We printed both sides, both front and back using the same screen, flipping the paper after we pressed it the first time.

Then we had to cut them, we didn’t really understand how much work this would be, so we could probably have planned better to save time and effort. Still after a couple of hours, we’d pulled it off and we each had a nice, little stack of cards.

One can’t accuse us of not trying to up the complexity of each project…

..and there’s more coming, so stick around!

Take a look at how it got made… =)

This time we layered our film to get a better exposure and easier wash-out of the stencil. Worked great, came right out and in no-time at all.

We also didn’t want to have to mix the color every time we were to print something using Bombyx Orange. Therefore, we simply went out and bought a liter of interior house-paint in the correct shade. The water-based paint is also easier on the brain and we don’t need to wear a mask when cleaning up screens and squeegee.

Me and Knut making sure we get correct registration on the paper. Our MacGyver-clamps worked perfectly.

House-paint is a lot more runny than our solvent inks, making us adjust our technique accordingly. We had planned on doing 50 posters, we ended up with 48, one got torn and another was a misprint. We had some problems with the text on a few, we found the solution was to flood less, but most came out looking great.

When we ran out of paper we scooped the remaining paint back into the box, no point in wasting valuable Bombyx Orange, haha!

We laid them out to dry flat, they curled a lot more when hung up. When they were dry enough, we then pressed them flat for a few hours, using a combination of tables and old eMacs… =)

We put some of them up around NKF, signed and numbered, and gave a few to some of those who have helped up along with tips and support. 

Next up was printing ourselves some business-cards, a lot of them, printed on both sides, stay tuned…

Before we got started doing the actual designs, we wanted to get a feel for the possibilities. We’ve seen what the seasoned veterans can do, now we wanted to see what kind of results we would be able to achieve so we didn’t aim too high too soon. By doing a couple of test-prints with line weights, halftone gradients and obviously varying font sizes and weights we figured we’d get a fair view of what we would be able to pull of our press. A couple of fun, short and hectic prints that showed us where our limits lie during our ‘early days’…

We had some troubles from the get go, putting too much emulsion on our screen and getting some dripping. Still, we got the stencil to wash out after our exposure, with some effort. Still, we had tasted blood and were not deterred from moving forward at full speed. So we fixed our screen, registered the paper, opened a brand new can of pink Libragloss and mixed the thinner until we felt it had the right flow. We ended up pulling 12 prints, realizing that our haste when applying emulsion had cost us quite a bit. Try again! The darkroom wasn’t as kind the next time, with our stencil washing out, under/over exposure due to thick emulsion layer that probably wasn’t fully cured either. Reclaim screen… try again. Next time things worked like a charm, we were starting to see that part of the problem was our film-positives. They weren’t dark enough, resulting in partially exposed stencils. Next time we would have our printer turn up the ink-coverage on our films. This time we did 24 prints, our fellow students, notably the illustration-class turned up, along with Alex, our receptionist, to follow the printing process. This print turned out much better and we were starting to get a good feel for what we were able to pull of… Bombyx, after months of research, planning and gathering supplies, were ready to proceed with printing some actual designs… …finally!

Screen printing is not an exact science, it is not a process where you take a file from your computer and output it directly to paper. Screen printing does not give you anything for free. Screen printing is a problem-solving exercise like no other.

So what do you do when you buy new screens that do not have the threaded holes for mounting to your press that your old screens do?

You pull out the duct-tape, the scrap wood, the box of left over screws…

…and go Macgyver.

Screens come in many varieties, and so do presses. Our Svecia has a system where the screen-clamps aren’t actually clamps. Instead, the press has two arms fitted with holes that you mount your screen to using threaded holes in the screens themselves.

The guys at the gigposters.com forum thought this had to be a non-original part, but since Svecia parts are notoriously hard to come by, not to mention in Norway, where screen printing is much, much more obscure than in the states, buying an original clamp-rig for un-drilled screens wasn’t really an option. Instead, I designed a bolt on clamp for the ones we already had. Sadly, I haven’t got access to the tools I’d need to make it here in Trondheim.

So what do we do? Well, first I visited Clas Ohlson where I found the meat of the clamp, one of those things you use to secure two pieces of 2×4 to each other in a joint. I found a size that fit and some matching screws.

It turned out that the screen would be to heavy and when applying pressure on it, the metal part bended, making it impossible to tighten the screen sufficiently. So Knut had the bright idea that we’d have to secure the 90 degree angle, something we did by cutting up a piece of scrap wood and securing it to the side of the clamp with wood screws. Then since the new screens have a smaller frame-profile than our old ones, we stuck another piece of wood into the clamp on the sides as a spacer. 

Ghettoclamps, they worked like a charm…