OUGD505 Studio Brief 02 Covered Screen Printing

I went to talk to the technicians in the print room about what scale half tone dots would be acceptable for screen printing and the response was anything below 60 lines per inch. To be extra safe I lowered mine to 55.

Something I didn't manage to consider before I printed the third and final set of positives was that the larger print for the exhibition would require a larger half tone because the image its self is bigger. I considered going back to the computer but decided against it because the positive looked ok.

To my relief the screen exposed perfectly and all the half tone detail came out really well (on the screen anyway).

I printed out two finishes in the digital print resource to experiment with when it came to the spot colour. However, I found that the satin paper tended to stick to the underside of the screen in a rather strange way and even damaged it slightly. 

Despite this I actually got some good prints on the satin paper but somehow the shine of the gold on shiny stock just seemed over kill, despite the fact that the print had looked great without the gold on top.

On the other hand the contrast of the sparkle of the gold with the matt of the fireproof paper seemed like a great finish and match perfectly with the juxtaposition of reality and the spectacle in the book.

As previously mentioned the satin paper looks great and has the edge of the artificial to it which fits the content of the book. However, I think the gold layer seems to the detriment to the actual design in this situation, because the reduced opacity looks so good on the silken surface.

When it came to printing the full book cover I hit a few more snags. The main problem was the fact that I had much more to line up so it took longer to get aligned and was less forgiving when it didn't. This meant that the first of the two chances I had to get the print right, the ink dried slightly on the screen while I was aligning the design and so produced a very uneven print, as can be seen above.

I skipped out the screen damaging satin print this time because I knew it wouldn't work. However I finally managed to get the second print to work and line up as accurately as possible. I am very glad that I had the foresight to reduce the opacity of the design underneath the gold print layer.