Behind the Scenes - Screen Printing

Well, my orchids are complete (13 paintings) and are at the printers being scanned professionally for cards. My scanner is not up to the fine nuances of shades of white.

So this is a good moment to tell you about my screen-printing journey.
The banners which I printed last summer will be on exhibition in Sunderland. All that Glisters is opening there today, and later in Bath.

Design Centre Sunderland SR1 3SD: 23 April - 9 May
Bath Central Library Bath, BA1 5AN: 15 May - 25 May
(logo Mary Noble)

I wanted to screenprint on silk fabric to make banners to hang with my Sacred Geometry work (at some stage). I thought I'd explain the process and try to be brief about my epic journey of "hanging in there by a thread" as it was VERY frustrating at times. With the wisdom of hindsight, and new understanding of silks,  it would be much easier.
So, first the design:
I drew thumbnails about 10cm X 3cm.
I scanned them to scale 1:10 and refined the positioning of words etc.
Below is a digital rendition after doing the Theo. and Fib. designs. The middle one is digital to see how they look together

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Then...
Original Artwork:
I used a C-0 speedball nib which allows me to treat it very roughly and do all sorts of pen twisting.
I wrote Fibonacci Sequence about 40cm in length, scanned it in and enlarged it to 1M80.

I drew Theodorus Wheel in pencil, roughly blocked in, then refined it as an outline about 30cm square. I scanned it in and refined it and rendered it digitally at size (about 60cm).

I needed to do the 100 Greatest Mathematicians virtually at size, and wrote them out criss-crossing on 3 sheets of paper each 50cm long. That's 1.5meters of lettering. The flourishes were too flourished so I re-did it with fewer flourishes and controlling the cross-overs better, When I did my first screening I realised the weight was too light so I went back to the drawing board and produced another three huge sheets of criss-cross lettering for the Greatest Mathematicians.

All in all, including extra "takes" I had done about 6 meters of at least 600 names! In the end I used Zerkall Butten paper and a Brause nib.

(I think this proves that while I'll try to short-cut processes where possible, I'll really slog if its not possible!)
Silk fabric - after many experiments, tea-dyeing, wasted ink and re-takes, I used Silco for the white banners. Silco is a silk 60% cotton 40% mix (if I remember correctly) and a 100% silk Dupion in earth colours with a bit of a pulled thread. In retrospect I would go straight to Berwick Street, Soho, and only use Dupion.

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