Silk Screen Printing Assignment

For this assignment we had to take a picture we had taken and put it on a t-shirt with a silk screen. I chose to use this photo because it was quite plain and simple, but still visually interesting and I could think of a good slogan I could put with it.

As you can see, this is not really a very ornate photo. But with a little photo-shopping, I can turn it into a cool pro-reading shirt.

First I took the screen and stretched it across a wooden frame. Then I painted it with a light-sensitive emulsion and put it in the dark room for a day to let it set. Then I photo-shopped the photo so that I had three different pictures; one with a white background and an all-black book, one with an all-white book and a black background, and one with everything white except the text and the line in the center of the book where the spine was. I also added the slogan "Shhhhhh... I'm Reading" in a spot where the text didn't show up. Then I asked Ms. Zanini to put these photographs on see-through sheets of plastic. When I had the sheets, I put them on the light table with the screen on top of them and turned the light table on. After 10 minutes I took it off the light table and scrubbed at the screen so the emulsion came off of the areas where the light didn't touch, or where there was black on the plastic sheets. After that I just mixed up the colours I wanted on my shirt, and used a squeegee to push them through my screen onto my shirt! I even added some little dots of blue colour because I thought they would look cute and they covered up one little smudge of blue paint on my shirt.The end product looked like this.

I like they way the end product turned out because I think it is visually interesting and came out the way I wanted it to. I also like they way this turned out because what you wear on your shirt can represent you, and I managed to come up with a picture and slogan that does just that. When people look at what you are wearing, they usually make a snap judgement on your personality based on your clothes, whether they want to or not. This shirt can tell everyone I love to read, correctly portraying my personality.I feel like I did a good job on this project.