Printing a morning

We wanted the project to be conceptually interesting as well as visually appealing (as we were going to show it on two design festivals). We were happy with the results considering it was the first time all of the pieces came together. But it was not what we were hoping for. We needed to do a lot more testing and gaining information of experts who actually know how this stuff works, before we were going to get the perfect result with the mixture.

Anyway that’s all good and well, but what are we going to do for our presentation at these design events? The parts of the print that really showed the potential of our idea were the 2 hours of sunrise and sunset. In the morning you could really see what the reaction is of the light sensitive emulsion with the strength of the rising sun. We decided to take those two hours and enhance it to the screen. This way you would get a gradient going from black (not exposed) to white (‘fully’ exposed).

So as it is now nearly 3 days before the exposition at the Graphic Design Festival Breda there will be some nifty planning to do. Nifty meaning we would have to abandon all our other works for the sake of finishing in time (printing, and building an exposition).

We were screen printing on Monday. So we could enlight the screen again on Tuesday, print again on Wednesday (if the Grafische Werkplaats Den Haag had space for us) and build up on Thursday.

We picked another open space closer to home to make it somewhat easier for ourselves. We arrived right on time, did the whole pushing of the cassette thing again (this time only 2 hours), packed it and drove back to Felix’s to wash out the unhardened mixture.

This time the washing of the screen took a lot less time. Was it because we only exposed it for 2 hours? Was it because we fortified the piece of paper on the backside of the window preventing stray light hardening our mixture? We couldn’t say, but the result was the capturing of a beautiful sunrise.
We were confident this would result in a great print. And it did.