Below is the process I undertook to screen print and print the content of the notebooks documenting all my failures and learning curves throughout this process.
First of all I address my failure of a day screen printing, I arrived at college bright and early and bought around £5 worth of stock and set about printing. I mixed together my neon orange and binder closely following the guidelines. After printing around 20 sheets I noticed that the neon orange wasn't taking as well as expected but I was reassured by a member of staff it should work but a student in there recommended I add more acrylic to increase the luminosity and make it take better to the paper. This worked straight away but I ran out of stock because I had previously used it all for my failure prints. Once i'd trimmed my paper ready for printing I returned to find out that too much acrylic had completely dried up and blocked my screen meaning i'd have to rinse my screen and start again the next morning. But i've learnt from my mistakes and I feel like it improved my confidence but also my knowledge and technique. Next time round I feel like I will be able to go in and crack on with it straight away.
pile of misprints
close up of poor dull neon orange
This illustrates how poorly the ink took the stock
Even on the off white it still looked dull and could barely make out the images
Below are the belly bands I also screen printed, these again were a failure from the start because I printed from the studio printer for my exposed images meaning the toner was quite patchy meaning it didn't clearly expose on my screen. However this was quite serendipitous because I think if it would have been solid black it could have been to harsh and completely detracted from the fine neon detail. The patchyness adds an added texture to the whole notebook and the type is still readable which is a bonus.
Below is the content of my book that printed either back to front, upside down or back to front and upside down. This was entirely my fault because of the way I had set up my indesign document to print; I had ticked 'flip horizontally' and long edge binding as opposed to short edge binding. This was a major mistake as I had printed off the document 4 times before I corrected my failings, luckily it was only black and white meaning i'd only wasted around £1 plus money i'd spent on bulky news print.
This below is what all that effort screen printing was for, it doesn't seem like much but that's a whole day and a half put into 3 notebook covers. I'm extremely pleased how they turned out because I was slightly sceptical about how the light weighted lines would come out because they could barely be seen through my screen.
