After submitting the designs, getting the ‘cher to review them and then choosing one out of the approved ones, it was time – for tote bag printing.

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First step was to cover the screen with some blue emulsion (name tbc) that would hold the design onto the screen. After giving it an even coat on my first try (yes i’m bragging but I thought I’d get paint everywhere except onto the screen) I left it to dry in the big dryer.

After it dried, we got our transparency paper w/ the design printed on it and taped it to the screen. After that it was put in the blacklight machine that embossed the design in black onto the blue.

After getting the print backlit onto the screen, we had to go into the “secret sink room” to wash off the print using a very noisy water gun to remove all the black embedding from the screen to get a transparent layer where the logo is supposed to be.

After gun-washing the thing for about 10 minutes to get off the print, we got an amazing result from it.

I was a bit annoyed because the print from the NS print shop /side eyes/ came off and my angel had a random hole in her head. Spoiler alert: managed to get it off with some Beta-something. (name tbc)

Rui Rong’s, Qiu Min’s, Arianne’s and mine.

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Fast forward one week and we got out the dried screens and started silkscreening.

First we tried on the paper.

I was feeling unnaturally confident so I decided one test print was enough and that i didn’t need to clog up the holes unnecessarily.

I then went ahead and printed on my first bag (the personal one from Muji)

And it came out quite well – nothing too blotty or illegible, so in that momentum (and before I lost my confidence), I quickly screened it onto the final bag used for submission.

And voila.

I admit, the design’s quite small compared to the bag but I liked the composition and, more importantly, I loved the quote.
Plus my non-ADM friends seemed to like how it looked so looks like I got some objective votes too hahahaha. (which seemed like a good omen because in the future not everyone’s going to understand the process anyways and they’ll just go with what they see.)

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I really did enjoy the process, right from the quotes research to the learning of the PS process (I will definitely use halftone a lot more from now on), the creation of the compositions & the silkscreening itself. I learnt alot about not being too obvious and direct with designs and how better to put across meanings in a more modernised and stylistic way.

I hope we do more silkscreening because I wouldn’t mind some artsy t-shirts 😉