A Brief Guide to Screen Printing

As another follow up to a lecture, i'm looking at the process of Screen Printing. Due to my interest in music and music posters, i've always really loved the look of a screen print, which is one of the most popular methods for poster design with bands today.


Screen printings origins come from the idea of using a stencil. When the time came for needing more durable stencils that were capable of printing hundreds of copies of something for commercial use, the idea for Screen Printing was patented in 1887 to Charles Nelson Jones. This involved using paper stencils which were fixed to frames which had woven silk stretched around them. Brushes initially were used to push the ink through the silk screen, but the development of a squeegee help to advance the capability of Screen Printing.


At the start, screen printing was used just for commercial purposes. But in the 1930's the process began to be used for Fine Art and still is today. In the 60's the iconic Pop Art movement saw the method gain popularity among artists such as Warhol and Robert Raushenberg.


Today there are two common ways of coming up with a stencil. Direct and Indirect. Indirect is the most popular where you can either create a hand cut paper stencil which you place over the frame or you can use the Photo Emulsion method. The Photo Emulsion method involves coating the silk screen with light sensitive liquid emulsion and you then place your stencil above it which is often printed onto acetate. You then use light to expose the image. The light hardens the emulsion everywhere except for the image. That area of the screen is rinsed off with water to reveal the stencil. Simple right? Well I didn't think so at first, but this video helped me out quite a bit to visualise the process,

I recently did a project on Anthony Burrill, he uses screen printing for some of his print based stuff. He's a nice guy, heres a video of a project he did in response to the Gulf Of Mexico oil spill back in 2010. 

Finally, a cool site I stumbled upon whilst writing this is Printeresting.org. The article i've selected is about a Poster Convention which is in Austin, Texas during SXSW, a big music festival every year in March. The article shows a variety of peoples work, including Jason Munn, who I mentioned in my last Blog post.

Information sourced from the book 'Print Making, A Complete Guide to Materials and Processes'.