The Process of Epistemology

Last night I decided that it had been too long since I last silk-screened something, so I dusted off the epistemology screen and got to it. At first my idea was to arrange the TVs in a two by two grid in the center of the paper with a bit of overlap. I wanted to do this so the colors would mix visually at the overlapping points, giving me the secondary colors in addition to the process colors (more on that in a second). I was also going to print a black TV as well, opposite the blue one. I abandoned this however after I printed the blue (cyan) and magenta, opting instead to print the yellow atop these first two colors, which would still give the overlap I wanted.

I used the process colors for this little project, which are magenta, cyan (blue) and yellow, these are the basic colors your printer uses to mix all the others (plus black). They can be mixed to attain virtually any color (even red, go ahead and gasp!). My desire was that through their overlapping I would achieve some kind of orange, green and purple, which I did to some extent. The mixing/overlap wasn't as obvious due to the linear quality of the image. In other words, the shapes don't cover a lot of area, something I'll consider the next time I overlap colors.

On a technical note: the magenta and blue I used lacked the viscosity I like in an ink. Anything thinner than mayonnaise will pass through the screen to quickly and is hard to control. The result is blurry lines, as you can see in the photos. My black ink is much thicker and more user friendly, as you can see from the results of a former project involving the epistemology design.

Part of the problem might have been that I was using fabric inks, which might need to be thinner to penetrate cotton and other fabrics, although the black is for textiles too. The black is from www.dickblick.com (it's the Blick brand) and the three process colors are Speedball brand. Speedball's yellow is nice and thick and I think this is because the three colors are intended to be mixed to achieve the desired color and a good resultant consistency, as opposed to use alone. The inks might also benefit from a good stirring as some of the polymers might have settled to the bottom.The results might also be from the squeegee I used which had a round edge instead of the square edge of my other one. I'll have to do another run and see if there is a difference.

It was fun, despite the material challenges, so I'm glad I did it. More to come...