Screenprinting is also known as silkscreen or serigraph. The screen is made of a very fine mesh stretched tightly over a wooden or metal frame. Originally silk fabric was used but nowadays manmade fibres such as nylon are more common.

The screen is placed in the frame of a printing table and a piece of paper placed underneath it. To make the image a fine layer of ink is pushed through this mesh onto the printing paper using a rubber bladed squeegee.

This process must be repeated with each sheet of paper.

Screenprinting is a direct method of printing; the image on the screen is the right way round unlike etching, linocut & Lithography where the image drawn onto the template is reversed.

The image is built up using stencils to block out areas of the mesh so that the ink is prevented from reaching the paper.

There are several types of stencil that can be used, newsprint, liquid stencils or light sensitive emulsion.

Each time I want to print a different colour I must clean the ink and stencil off the screen and replace it with a different stencil. Colours and tones are gradually built up in this way

My screenprints are original, handmade prints. I adhere to the guidelines on handmade prints in that I create & print the image by hand, the images are not reproductions, photographs or mechanically produced prints. I do
not make colour separations using a computer.

The edition number (total number of prints in a run) is small, usually around 25, and after the edition is complete I destroy all the stencils I use to make it.