Here be Snapdragons: Polychromatic and Breakdown Printing

We did Polychromatic and Breakdown Printing in class. Very chemically and very messy work. My classmates made a much better fist of it which always demoralises me.

Polychromatic Printing

Polychromatic printing is where Procion MX dye is painted onto the screen and dried. It is then printed out onto cloth that has been previously soda soaked and dried. This is done by pulling dye paste through the screen.

You more or less know what you're going to get but as you repeat the print it fades which can give some nice effects.

From this screen...

...I got this print - I had sprinkled some hole punch dots on the cloth

For the next try (below) I laid out a tree stencil and pulled a screen with reds and magentas dried on it. I went left to right so the print faded as it went. I then laid out a leaf stencil and with a green screen I pulled from right to left so the leaves get fainter as they go.

Because the cloth was wet from the first pull the leaves have a fuzzy edge. If I wanted a sharp edge I'd need to let the first layer batch and dry and do the leaves another day.

Print Two

The tree stencil after the pulls

The leaf stencil after the pulls

For my final try I painted some olive green on a screen but without going all the way to the edges. It looked purposely painterly. I then put some magenta dots randomly across the screen. After it dried I laid out some bird stencils on the fabric and pulled.

Print Three

Bird stencils

Breakdown Printing

It's worth watching this video of Kerr Grabowski demoing Deconstructed (Breakdown) Screen Printing first.

The difference here is that the dye applied to the screen is thickened dye. As the print paste is pulled over it it releases parts of the dye randomly. The results are unexpected and exciting.

Mine where somewhat underwhelming if I'm honest but at least I tried.