Minc House was recently invited by a friend and art teacher at Miss Hall’s School, located in Pittsfield, MA, to participate in a silk screen workshop for their Art Club. I visited the school twice in the last two weeks to discuss and show the girls how to create their own silk screen. The first meeting went over what makes for a good screen print design, and I showed them a few examples of my own finished work. It was good for the students to see some completed products in order to gain a better understanding of the process from start to finish. Most of our first class was spent drawing and creating designs. We used the photocopier to enlarge or reduce images and discussed what kind of line work would or would not work well for printing. The teacher, Sophie Lee, and I chose to use drawing fluid to create the screens and avoid using a dark room and transparencies as our time was limited to a total of two hours. I brought a screen with a traced image filled in with drawing fluid to show them their next step, and they had the next week to transfer their images to screens using pencil and paint in their designs using drawing fluid and paintbrushes. When I returned the following week, many of the students had taken the initiative and come in on their free time to work on their screens. Others continued to work on filling in their designs and some went back and worked on painting another layer with the drawing fluid in order to ensure good line quality. We were able to coat a few of the screens with blocker as well, and a handful of the girls were in a position ready to print the following day. Hopefully they will come together in the remaining days to print their work for Parent’s Weekend and sell them at school–this was their eventual goal.
I was very impressed by the creativity of thier designs. Many of them depicted faces or people, something I tend to shy away from, but the playfulness of their drawings was refreshing and I may go back and do some more illustration in the weeks to come. Moreover, it was great to return to a process of screen printing that I have not done in 4 years. I first learned how to print in the basement of my college using drawing fluid and blocker, hanging our screens over vents, waiting for them to dry and impatiently trying to speed up the process. I remember loving the slow and meditative process of painting intricate designs onto a screen, and I plan on creating more screens in this way in the future. With all of our “modern” advances in the world of screen printing, and the art world in general, it is easy to forget the simplicity of the craft and to treasure the time and process it takes to actually create something. I am glad that I was able to teach these girls in the way in which I was taught, and I hope they learned that making a screen is more simple than it appears, and to take their time in painting on their design and enjoy the natural process of creating a screen–old school school style.