What is Silkscreen?

Screen printing is a printing technique for creating an image using a frame with a grid stretched over it. The image printed with this technique is also called screen printing. It started as an industrial application and was adopted by American artists in the early 20th century. The Pop Art movement of the 1960s made the technique more widely known. Many of Andy Warhol's best-known works have been created using this technique. It is now a popular technique both in the Fine Arts and in industry, in which it is mainly used for printing various subjects on blouses, hats, ceramics, glass, polyurethane, polypropylene, paper, metal and wood. Screen printing is often preferred over classic printing due to its lower cost but also because with this technique we can print on a wide range of surfaces and materials.

Technique

On one side of a frame we glue and stretch a mesh of polyester fibers well. Then spread a photosensitive ointment on the grid and let it dry with the help of hot air. We create the subject we want to print on a transparent surface (transparent plastic, rice paper, etc.) either by hand or using a printer. We place on a strong light the transparency with our subject and above the frame. Where there is an issue, the light does not reach the photosensitive ointment, while where there is no ointment, it hardens. We wash the frame and the ointment that has not polymerized and has not hardened is rinsed leaving a copy of our subject on the grid. Then we place the frame on the surface we want to print, we spread paint and with the help of a spatula we press the paint to pass through the parts of the grid that are open. If we want colorful printing for each color we use a different frame while for photo prints we use the technique of four colors.

Applications

Silkscreen printing has found application in a number of artistic and commercial works. Multiple copies of posters or paintings, printing of themes on fabric (blouses, carpets, awnings, etc.), printing of instruments (dials) of vehicles and watches, lighters, pens, CDs, folders, etc. The main feature of screen printing is that with the use of the appropriate color it can print a series of materials (paper, plastic, metal, wood, fabric, etc.) but also a series of surfaces, smooth or not, since printing does not require pressure or some other limiting factor. Today there are a number of automatic as well as manual machines that can accomplish a series of low cost and high speed prints. In artistic silkscreen printing, however, more traditional methods are used with less involvement of the machine and technology and greater involvement of the "artist's hand".


Source: https://el.wikipedia.org/