In the world of Pop art, using this commercial reprographic method in order to produce fine art was a reference to consumer culture at the time, however there was scepticism from some artists that this could be classed as fine art due to the involvement of the machine and separation from the artist to the medium. However, it wasn’t until the Pop art movement of the 60’s that screen print really took off, with artists including Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg popularising the process and legitimising it as a fine art technique. This also spurred artists to begin experimenting with the method in America in the mid-1930’s, re-naming their technique ‘Serigraphy’ in order to differentiate from the more commercial outputs of the method. The technique was then adopted in Europe in the 15th century and used for decorative and artistic processes including fabric printing, with paint originally being forced through the silk fabric using a hard bristle brush.įast forward to the 20th Century, silk became more affordable and readily available and the rubber squeegee was developed, allowing the process to be more practical in commercial advertising production. It was discovered that by supporting a stencil on a mesh, designs could be printed without the ‘bridge line’ connecting central parts of a design (for example the central circle of a stencil for the letter O). The origins of screen print come from ancient China during the Song Dynasty Art era (960-1279), where the medium was developed as a more advanced stencil printing technique. This means each colour will require its own stencil or screen. Printing through a stencil means that images are printed one colour layer at a time and gradually built up until a design is complete. For example creating a stencil out of paper is far quicker than exposing a screen using light-sensitive emulsion however you would only manage to get a handful of prints before the stencil starts breaking down, whereas an emulsion exposed screen will be far more hard wearing, allowing you to print thousands of images. There is no right or wrong way of creating a stencil but different methods are beneficial in different situations. Stencils can be created a number of ways including using paper, tape, painting a non-permeable substance onto the mesh or by using a light-sensitive emulsion (similar to exposing a photograph).
When preparing a screen for printing, the non print areas of the mesh are blocked, creating a stencil that allows the ink to only pass through the image or ‘open’ areas of the screen. Sometimes this printing method is called ‘serigraphy’, ‘silk screen printing’ or ‘silkscreening’ in reference to the material originally used as the mesh on screens, nowadays this material is more commonly a synthetic fabric such as nylon.
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