I had seen the photo-emulsion method before in high school so I had a pretty good idea of what to do, and I'd watched a few videos to be sure.
Back to the story, so the other day my girlfriend bought me a 40cm x 50cm screen, and I ordered 2 more because they didn't have stock. So today I phoned them up and they had stock so I went and bought the 2 screens, a scoop-coater and some photo-emulsion. I decided to try out a little 1 colour design on my old wooden screen before I moved on to large A3 multi colour prints.
Did everything in garage, coated the screen with emulsion and left it to dry for an hour. Only when I went out did I realise that the emulsion was bright blue, I hadn't opened the tub before obviously and when I did it was pitch black. But yeah then I went back to expose the design. I used this design for the test.
I printed it on some low gsm tracing paper and I used the highest black print quality I could so it would be thick and stuff. I then used my light box which has 4 fluorescent light tubes and is about 820mm x 300mm so it can fit an A3 to expose the design. I left it for like 30mins because from what I'd read around the internet that seemed like a decent guess.
Cleaned it off and gave it a quick test screen and this how it came out.
It came out pretty over exposed so next time (maybe tomorrow) I'm gonna try like 15mins and see how that goes and then go from there. Although I'm pretty bleak it didn't come out perfect first time, I'm pretty stoked everything went pretty well and the light box works and stuff. Most of it was guess work and stuff so I guess it went moderately well. Oh, and I think my scanner sucks...
///UPDATE:
Okay so I cleaned the screen off and started from the beginning again, did everything basically the same, except only exposed it for 15mins, and this is how it came out!
Once again it looks kinda crap because I decided to take a photo because it was still wet, but yeah, other than the crappish photo, the print came out awesome! Next time I might try like 12mins or so.
I was pretty excited when I was testing it and I didn't feel like going to the study, so I screened it on a little canvass I had lying around. The canvass had textured paint on it, which I figured would work well, but came out pretty sick anyway!
///UPDATE 2:
So yesterday I decided to start trying my 3 layer, A3 screen print mission. Firstly, the emulsion was still wet, but I was on a bit of a time budget so I started exposing it anyway, which didn't work at all.
Today I decided it was too dark in the garage so I figured I would try somewhere a bit lighter to see how that worked out. That didn't work out at all and the emulsion wouldn't wash out after exposing it.
So back to the garage, I messed up a bit when I was coating the emulsion on to the screen but I think I managed to sort it out. Exposed it for like 15mins and it seemed like I did everything right, but for some reason it came out crappy, like it looks like it's over exposed, but I don't think that's it. The other problem is the light box is just A3, So I don't think it's exposing the screen evenly. I'm at a bit of a loss for solutions at the moment, so i'm gonna wait for my parents to get back from England (2 weeks >.>) and then I'm gonna get my dad to help make me a decent sized light box that my screens fit perfectly in to, maybe try get some unfiltered black lights and maybe a red light for the garage and then work from there.
*sigh*
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