LITMIR.BIZ

      Citrus Slice Coasters

      by Casey Starks

      These playful citrus coasters would be great for a summer barbeque. Your guests could even take them home as party favors. Once you get the feel for the technique, reuse the supplies to create customized screen printed coasters for any theme. Try out the herringbone or ikat designs included in the templates section or come up with your own designs!

      There are many different methods for screen printing. The drawing fluid method, outlined here, allows you to paint a design directly on the screen. With this technique you can create a beautiful, hand-painted design and print it on anything, over and over again, in any color. Since each brushstroke is unique, your design will certainly be one of a kind.

      Casey Starks

      California native Casey Starks is the creative mind behind her brands Vitamini and Vitamodern that feature screen printed gifts and stationery based on her original drawings and papercut designs. When she's not at her day job as a landscape architect, Casey can be found blogging, thrifting, or cruising around Silicon Valley in her yellow MINI Cooper, looking for inspiration. She loves bright colors, graphic patterns, and everything retro.

      Blog: vitaminihandmade.blogspot.com

      Shop: vitamini.etsy.com and vitamodern.etsy.com

      Why Screen Printing?

      Screen printing, also known as silk screening, is an artistic technique that has been around for centuries. Basically, a screen print is a design that has been created by forcing ink through a stretched fabric stencil. There are countless methods for creating screen stencils. The most temporary stencils can be made by applying paper, tape, or contact paper tape directly to the screen, blocking out the design. The drawing fluid method, outlined in this tutorial, begins with a hand-painted design applied to the screen as a resist. The open areas are blocked with screen filler and the design is washed out, resulting in a stencil of the painted design. This is a good method to start with as a beginner. When I create screens for my business-related prints, I use the photo emulsion method. With this method, a light-sensitive screen is created. The design, an opaque, black image on a transparency, is layered over the screen and exposed to light. The exposed areas of the screen harden, and the spaces underneath the design remain water soluble. The screen is rinsed and only the design washes out, resulting in a stencil that is an exact replica of the original design. Preparing a screen for printing can be a labor-intensive process, but the high-quality printed results, combined with the ease of reproduction, make the preparation worthwhile.

      I fell in love with screen printing because everything about it is fundamentally handmade: from stretching the screen fabric, to coating the screen, and later applying my own hand drawn design, and rinsing it out at just the right moment. I also love the professional, high-quality results. Screen printed designs can be very versatile, in that they can be simple, one color designs or complex, layered images created with multiple colors and textures. With a screen print, each color is printed one at a time, so prints with multiple colors are the result of multiple screen stencils layered over one another. It’s an involved process that requires dedication, skill, and a commitment to the craft. Screen prints also have unique qualities and textures that can’t be achieved with a commercial inkjet or laser printer. For all of these reasons, I find screen printing to be very addictive. Once I get going, I want to print on everything in sight!