As usual, I seem to have left it last minute to get myself booked into the print room and blast out some work in time for London. But that's all part of the fun of it yeah? My packs have all been cut absolutely amazingly, thanks to the kind Laura & James over at Duke Studios and delivered just in time to get printed early this morning. I had a ton of the 2mm kraftboard left over so I made use of it by making some business cards. Slightly chunky, but worked nicely.
Yesterday was the final prepping of all the imagery that was going to be printed today, and man was that a rush job. Everything seemed to be going to swimmingly, when a couple of the screens I was using didn't expose correctly (seemed to be a problem with the emulsion) so needed to be stripped down to start again. Then, just I about to finish, I noticed there was a typo on some text so I was cutting it fine to re coat the screens/expose them/wash them before the doors were locked at 4pm, but I managed.
Today was a slightly more relaxed, but still fast paced day of printing. I was a bit skeptical as to whether the typeface would be too small and print eligible. It was considerably smaller on the cards then the packs but both were pretty small. After doing a few test runs, the acrylic didn't see to flood the lettering too much and worked surprisingly well. it was just one of those jobs where I had to keep my eye on things and wash the screens out a few times so the lines stayed crisp.
The printing onto the pack itself went better then expected which was a nice relief. The registration was a bit of a pain to start off with as the packs had a tendency of moving when the screened was pulled over. I managed to fix it by mounting up some of the spare card around the template and taping it together (photo below) Once its was then fixed down to the print bed, it stayed put and it was just a case of re registering the screen again.
It was nice to be back working in the print room and I wish I'd taken advantage of the facilities more so in the last few years. My work doesn't really lend itself to screen printing amazingly, as there's not enough block tone so it was cool to be working on something that did. To keep complications down to a minimum, I decided to use only two colours, but think this worked well with the natural brown of the card. Once each layer had been printed, I attempted to speed up the drying time by using a hair dryer. As the kraft board is quite light and made using a corrugated inner body, the intense heat (even when on low) from the dryer started to warp the boards towards the corners. It wasn't an obvious bend, but I wanted them as perfect as possible so just had to wait it out for ink to dry. The rest of the printing seemed to go well and lined up as best as I could get it to.
I bought some nice water colour paper that had a decent texture and weight to it for the prints to go inside the pack but the printer didn't seem to agree with me. In theory, the printer should have been able to handle the paper dead easy but instead it chewed it up and spat it out half eaten. I had to resort to using some thinner paper, which worked well, just didn't have the quality I wanted. It was then just a case of cutting the illustrations/business cards up, folding the packs together nice and neatly filling them up. I ended up using a couple of pritstick adhesive tabs to hold the cards in place as well as the lid shut that worked a treat.
The past few days have kept me busy and I'd almost forgotten about the London trip tomorrow. I'm pleased that I went ahead and made some additional promotion work to take down with me other then my portfolio. I think they look pretty good so it's now just a case of handing them out and hoping they think the same.
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