Blue Pansy Butterfly screen print
One more color to print, which is going to be yellow and red eye spots on the wings. These have turned out really well, I can’t wait to start cutting them out. All the metallic and reflective inks throw the light in different ways depending on the angle, so having a bunch of them with all the wings tilted in different directions will show off all the effects nicely.
All that metallic and semi gloss ink does funny things when layered over and over.
I started printing the blue on the butterflies yesterday, but I was a little too tired from working late and getting up early to print the whole run. Things like this I like to do when I am fresh, especially since the blue is so important to the overall look of the print. I’m hoping to get all these prints finished today so I can start cutting them out and getting my piece together for the Faultline Grand Opening May 12th.
2 butterfly stencils printed on abstract background
2 (or more) colors to go!
I’ve been working in a new way with the butterflies, and it has been way more fun than the previous way of spending days at the computer. This print is almost entirely hand drawn, I just used the computer to assign the colors to specific areas in of the butterfly. Some of the colors of the butterfly overlap by less than 1/100 of an inch, so a computer still comes in handy.
Ink Drawing on Vellum
The above drawing is ink on vellum, I made 2 of these for the background to the butterflies and overlapped the images several times with varying colors so all the prints are quite different. Then when I screen print the butterflies on top, all 3300 butterflies will be at least slightly different. Usually the challenge with printmaking is making all the prints the same, so making them all different is a whole new problem, especially in quantity.
First layers of butterfly screen prints
One thing that is interesting to me is the colors shift according to the angle of the light, and colors printed on top of other colors have more surface sheen, you can tell there is another layer underneath, even if the top color is opaque. I’ve always been fascinated by this phenomenon, and the butterflies work really well at showing this off since I’m going to cut out each butterfly and tilt the wings at different angles to catch the light.
butterfly under printing detail
I had a little studio visit from this beautiful Red Admiral (Vanessa atlanta) butterfly. I snapped a few pictures until it started to freak out and I put it outside. It was a nice little omen if you will, since I am in the middle of a big rush to get all my new butterflies ready for the show at Faultline May 10 & 12. The studio is an industrial area, so it was little surprising, but we are close to sloughs and there must be some nettle out their nearby. I might plant some nettles in my backyard, since this is what the caterpillars eat.
Strange to see a photo of a butterfly in an urban setting, isn't it?
Butterfly ink sketch for screen printing
I decided to draw another butterfly, I’m not really happy with the ones I have in the post a few days back. This one will do though. It is an ink drawing, and I’ll separate the colors in Photoshop and Illustrator. They are going to be four colors, with multiple passes of a few of the colors to make the ink pop off the black paper. I’m going to print these on top of some old ‘In God We Trust’ prints that didn’t make it into the edition.
'In God We Trust' screen print on black paper
When I first moved to San Francisco almost immediately after art school, I did a large edition of ‘In God We Trust’ 6 color prints. It was a bit of a disaster on several levels. I started out with something like 320 sheets of paper and ended up with an edition of 208, or something. The other 112 had some print flaws, so I kept them out of the edition. I was taught in school to always destroy your messed up prints, but I couldn’t justify ripping up hundreds of dollars of paper, so I’ve been using them for test prints and drawer liners.It will be nice to do something with them, other than storing them. I did some landscape monoprints in a similar fashion on the same prints.
Printing large editions is a fantastic way to hone your printing skills, and technically every single print in the edition should be identical. Large runs always multiply your issues exponentially, so it’s a pretty good way to figure your methods out. It can be extremely frustrating as well, especially if you are working large and have tight registration.
