Venice Screen Prints

I really enjoy screen-printing and I wanted to make sure that I was inducted on the screen-printing facilities as soon as possible, so I did a large amount of screen prints in my first term of uni. The image that I worked from with these prints was a film photograph that I took at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice on my disposable camera. I like to work mostly with my own photographs because I love being able to see the end work which always transports me to where I was when I took the original photograph that I’ve worked from.

I transferred this image onto a large piece of acetate and then exposed it onto a coated screen-printing screen. I wanted to experiment with colour and so in the beginning, I used different shades of pink and red printing ink within each print. After producing several different prints in the warm red tones, I moved onto the opposite side of the spectrum and produced some cool tone blue prints varying in shades.

I wanted to make some more experimental prints, and so I used overlaying multiple prints and colours to see how they turned out. I also laid paper scraps under the screen before printing to create some obscure half printed images which I really liked the result of.

I did a red print and then over-laid a blue print which then made it look like you were looking through those old red and blue 3D-glasses. The layered up prints are much more visually interesting than the ones that have been printed just once, which I think is because as a viewer, you have to work harder to figure out what the print is about due to the different colours and the overlay.

Following on from the red and blue over-laid print, I flipped the screen upside-down after the blue print, and printed red on top, but upside down, which created almost this block frame effect with busy detail of the buildings in the centre. Due to the second print being upside-down, it makes the image harder to recognise at first. The viewer has to work a little harder to work out what it is, and I really like this idea of the audience having a small journey to understanding this piece.

I have never really worked with architecture and buildings before, but I really enjoyed creating this series of screen-prints.