How To Screenprint

Screenprinting is a method of printing ink to any surface, like wood or fabric, but most commonly used with tshirts, sweaters, bags, etc.

To screenprint, you need a silkscreen, which is oddly named now that most of them are made of nylon now. It is best to get a 1/10 mesh. You then need emulsion to coat the silkscreen with, so that you can burn the image onto it. You make a black and white image and print it on a transparent sheet to use for the printing. The light will burn the emulsion and what's not burnt - the part covered by the black of the image - will be what is ready for printing. After burning the emulsion from exposure to light, you hose off the emulsion and put an equal coating of ink over the screen. Put this screen onto the shirt/bag/etc. you are printing on and wipe off the ink, then let it dry. The end result will be a properly printed silkscreen image.

Another method of screen printing which is much easier is defined in this video, by simply making a stencil and using fabric ink through the silk screen to put a design on your shirt/bag/etc. You can make a stencil by drawing out an image, or tracing an image with pencil onto the silk screen, and then painting around the areas that you don't want ink to get through with a glue like Mod Podge Glue, so that it doesn't get messy while you're inking. Another method of stenciling is simply to draw it out or print it on contact paper, and cut the paper with scissors or an exacto knife.

Another One Rides The Bus - Artist Statement

This is a music video me and my partner had to make. We picked Another One Rides The Bus by Weird Al Yankovic. We had many ideas for how to do it, and our first idea was to just use the TTC busses, but we figured that they wouldn't agree to us doing a music video there. We decided after that to build a model bus from cardboard and bring our friends to help act and make the video, but weren't sure how to make that efficently and keep it all working. We even considered using pets like my dogs and cats as actors or at least characters in the video, but that changed when we decided to make a much smaller mini bus with pipe cleaner characters. We tried to put the bus on a model race track with one of the model cars so it would look like it was driving, but when that didn't work we just decided to shoot a quick video of the model cars, and do the rest of the video in stop motion.

What I didn't like about this video was the fact that many of the photos ended up blurry and the camera was too shaky for an accurate shot, because the set was built on the floor and our tripod wouldn't sit as low as we needed.

My favorite part of this video was right at the end with the main character dancing. It didn't turn out exactly as I'd expected, but it was still cute.