Screen printing
Silk screen printing refers to the art of printing on silk. It derives from one of the oldest forms of printing, which consisted of copying an image using a stencil. The origins of screen printing can be found in Asia, around the 10th century BC. In Japan, it was used in the 15th century to transfer drawings onto silk. In Europe, silkscreen printing did not really take off until the 20th century and it became an art form in the United States in the 1930s, when a group of artists coined the term " sérigraphie ". Andy Warhol is considered to be the first person to use screen printing as screen printing.
The screen must be prepared for sérigraphie : in a room with little light, it is coated with a photographic emulsion that will be used to create the stencil. First of all, a stencil has to be made, either a cut based (or not) on a paint original. The pattern is applied to the screen by exposing it to light, which hardens the photographic emulsion.
The printing stage can begin. The screen is placed on a wooden frame. This has areas blocked with a stencil representing the negative of the image, so that the ink may or may not pass through.
The ink is spread on top of the screen, itself above the paper. The ink will pass through the open areas to settle on the paper below. Once printing is finished, the screen is cleaned and stripped to be used again for the next screen printing job.