Rolled screen prints

Over the course of fifteen plus years running an art-centric print shop, I took on a lot of challenging work. Clients asked me to do things that were already turned down by a handful of other shops because no one wanted to take on the challenge. Rolled screen prints were one of tougher types of prints that I took from my client work and applied to my personal work here.

Assembled Portrait

I had a drawing that I really liked that I wanted to try printing across multiple rounded objects. I grabbed some 1″ dowels and setup my screen. The first round of prints was a total failure. I hadn’t considered how much of the image would get lost between the dowels. I recreated the film with overlapping image portions and rerolled each of the pieces. The results were cool and I just had to figure out how to display the piece.

Geometric screen

I wanted to use the what I learned from the portrait piece and figure out a way to not lose so much of my image behind the rolled surface. I decided to work with an image that could be broken up, spaced out, and still read as a whole. Rifling through my archives, I pulled a geometric design and worked on setting up the film. This piece was created for a show called Bless This Mesh that featured all screen printed work. I decided to mount the final piece on a used screen to go extra extra.

Rolled CMYK

The last of this set was by far the hardest of the three. I wondered if it was possible to do a 4-color process print and roll it onto wood. The last two pieces were done on 1″ dowels and I wanted something more substantial for this so that there were less dowels and more image. I found something near 4″ thick and got to work on my design.

Each summer my parents backyard comes alive with different flowers my father plants. Living in the city, the contrast I see there when I visit accentuates bright colors and quiet they have. I take a million photos each time I’m there and I decided to use a set of them for this piece. I collaged together a couple different images and threw in some geometric accents.

Fast forward to actually printing these. The other rolled prints I created were all done the same way: flood the screen, flip it over, roll the substrate over the back and pull the ink onto the surface. To create a 4-color CMYK, that just wasn’t going to work. The solution I came up with was to print the 4-color print down onto a surface that wouldn’t soak up the print at all and then roll the wood ontop of that to extract the print. I think I used a big piece of plastic stuck down onto my press pallet. The results, surprisingly, worked out really well. The hardest part of this piece ended up being figuring out how to put it together and hang it on the wall!