Over the last few weeks I’ve been screen printing with middle school kids. When you set a kid up to print it’s easier and better for them to have a little bit extra ink to print with. It makes it easier for them to succeed instead of needing to use the squeegee many times to get one layer of ink. So there is a lot of extra ink on the screen. Depending on the situation you can scrape it back into the pot. But I really like to have them print it out onto scrape paper.

This gives them some no pressure printing experience- the more prints you make the more at ease you get with it and the better and faster you print.

​I started this with my prototype images, I printed out my images and then scraped my excess ink across a stack of paper.

It worked really well. It reminded me of my old art journal pages.

Then I had the kids do the same thing, printing and scraping and just generally getting all their excess ink off their screen and squeegees.

The results are great.

Screen printing ink is acrylic paint that is a little gelly like and looser than heavy body but doesn’t have as much flow as liquid acrylic. It also dries very slowly until it is on paper or fabric. There are a few different types of screen printing ink- the sort just for paper and the sort for fabric. The fabric ink is a little thicker depending on the brand.

I use a few different brands- Speedball for paper and fabric as well as Jacquard for all surfaces (including fabric). Speedball is the most affordable while I think Jacquard feels the best on fabric. Golden also makes a screen printing medium which really loosens up any acrylic paint and makes it dry VERY slowly. (I think this could be used by gelli printing artists for really nice monotypes, just saying, gotta test that idea for sure.)

Anyway, doing this with this kids and myself really felt like coming home. A super cozy relaxing printing sesh but also the coziness of a paint scraping sesh that I used to do. Results below:

Some of these look finished and some feel like they need more work- some collage, some more paint, some gesso. But mostly it was a really cozy little paint scraping session.