Extract: How Screenprints are Made

Coming to prominence in the 1920s, screenprinting was originally used for the mass production of banners, posters and billboards. Within a decade, it had become attractive as an artistic medium due to its accessibility: it was cheap and easy to set up. While artists in the USA and Britain continued to explore this method throughout the 1930s, 40s and 50s, it wasn’t until the 1960s that screenprinting left its mark.

In 1962, Andy Warhol (1928–1987) exhibited two silkscreened paintings: Green Coca-Cola Bottles and the Marilyn Diptych (originally two separate canvases). Warhol was just one of many of a new generation of artists who had discovered screenprinting and liked that their art mimicked the mass-produced, mechanical
look of posters and packaging.

Screenprints: A History, the first title in the V&A’s new series on the historic practice of printmaking, is a celebration of the fine-art applications of this versatile medium and its enduring presence in contemporary art. In the following extract, get an inside look on how exactly screenprints are made.

How Screenprints are Made 

Screenprinting is a method of creating an image on paper (or some other material) by pushing ink through a stencil attached to the underside of a screen. The process is perfectly expressed in Glynn Williams’s Print (1973). The screen is a woven mesh – originally silk, but now usually nylon or polyester – stretched taut over a rigid wood or metal frame which is hinged to a board or tabletop. Screens vary from a very fine to a quite coarse (open) mesh. The stencil is created by cutting a design into a sheet of paper or plastic film, leaving openings for the ink to pass through.

The inner edges of the frame are blocked using adhesive tape to prevent ink seepage; at the upper edge this also acts as a channel for the ink. The viscous ink is pulled across the screen using a squeegee (an implement with a flexible rubber or plastic blade). It passes through the mesh and any apertures in the stencil onto a sheet of paper placed underneath. A new screen is required for each colour, though overprinting can introduce further colours without additional screens.

Alternatively, the screen itself may act as the stencil. Those who adopted the medium in the 1940s and ’50s commonly used the tusche-and-glue method, in which the design is drawn or brushed on the screen with tusche, a greasy medium also used for drawing on lithographic stones. When the tusche is dry, the screen is coated with glue and once this has hardened the tusche is washed way, taking the glue in these areas with it, leaving the drawn areas open to act as a stencil. Working in this way, artists can create more fluid painterly effects than those achieved with cut or torn paper stencils. There are multiple variations on this process,
but the principle is broadly the same.

More commonly today, imagery is transferred to light-sensitized screens using photography or a drafting film such as True Grain, on which the artist can draw the design, and which then serves as the negative to transfer the image to the screen.

The process of making a screenprint (in this instance based on a photograph taken by the artist), is set out in a sequence of stage proofs and ancillary documentation in Gerd Winner’s Making a Print portfolio (1973–4), printed at Kelpra. The first sheet reproduces the photograph, the artist’s preliminary sketches and the colours used to create the print. This is followed by a sheet with the nine colour separations set out in sequence, and then by successive stage proofs as each colour is added.

In a short film for the V&A’s How Was It Made? series, Adam Bridgland demonstrates the preparation and printing of Better It Is To Get Wisdom Than Gold (2023–4), a limited-edition 6-colour screenprint commissioned by the V&A.

First, the artist creates a design to act as a guide for the production of the ‘acetates’ that will be used to make the stencils – one for each colour to be printed.

The artist lays a sheet of semi-transparent True Grain drafting film (the acetate) over the original design, and then, using a brush, he traces onto it in black ink, following the areas of (in this instance) red in the original design: red will be the first colour to be printed. The sheet is labelled ‘red’ and set aside to dry. He repeats the process for each of the other colours, ending with the acetate for the text, which will be printed last.

Then a screen is prepared. After washing it to remove all traces of earlier stencils, a light-sensitive emulsion is applied evenly across the clean dry mesh in a darkroom. The artist then lays an acetate on the screen and exposes it to light. The light hardens the areas of emulsion not masked by the marks drawn on the acetate; where the light has been blocked, the emulsion remains soft and can then be washed away, leaving the stencil for the areas to be printed embedded in the screen.

The screen is then fixed at one hinged edge to the printing table and a sheet of paper is laid on the surface underneath, carefully aligned with the registration marks that have been fixed on the table to ensure that each colour will be printed in proper relation to the previous one.

The artist then lowers the screen and applies the ink for the first colour to the top edge of the screen. Then, without pressing the ink through the screen, he pulls the ink across with the squeegee – a process called ‘flooding’, which ensures that the ink is evenly spread across the screen before pressure is applied to push it through onto the paper with the second pull of the squeegee. When he lifts the screen the red elements of the design can be seen, printed on the paper below.

The paper is removed and laid on a wire rack to dry. The artist proceeds to print every sheet for the edition with red, and when these are dry, he repeats the whole process to print each of the subsequent colours. When the final printing is complete, the edition is signed and numbered.

Screenprints: A History by Gill Saunders is available now