Testing, testing!

Posted May 3rd, 2009. By Kim André.

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!