I received a shipment of printmaking supplies on Friday, so I got to do some printing this weekend! Included in the shipment was a product I’d never tried before, called Scratch-A-Print 2, and decided to try it as an alternative to screen printing. It started with a sketch of a lemon slice:

And a screen, which is — to quote the product description — “a special red-coated tissue” (although you can see that it is really blue) mounted to a card frame.

Since the tissue is translucent, I was able to use the lightbox to transfer my design to the screen.

Here’s the cool part: the coating on the tissue is pressure-sensitive, so that when you trace over the design, the tissue is exposed where you traced — the area to be printed. (There is a sheet of clear film that protects the tissue from tearing when you are drawing.) If you hold it up to the light, you can see the opened areas.

So this was all very exciting, and — since you can’t use oil-based inks to print with the Scratch-A-Print screen — I pulled out some acrylics to print with, and loaded up my foam roller with a lovely cadmium yellow.

Then, with my paper underneath, I flooded the screen with paint and held my breath for the DRAMATIC REVELATION of my BEAUTIFUL LEMON SCREEN PRINT…

Yeh, not so much.

I tried a few more times with more paint, watered down paint, more pressure, and while I got some better results, they were all still crap. I finally tried flooding the screen with ink on the foam roller, placing another piece of paper on top and applying MORE pressure with a brayer, hoping that would force the paint through.

Really it just made the top paper stick to the screen. I managed to peel it off, and ended up with an accidental print from the blue tissue residue. It was probably the best print of the night.

However, it did open up the screen.

I gave the screen a rinse, and tried printing one more time. The result wasn’t bad, but still not quite good enough, and you can see that there was still blue crap and graphite residue on the screen. Eww.

So I rinsed it out again and tried printing with black, because at least you wouldn’t be able to see all the crap getting into the paint. But that still didn’t turn out any better than a really bad photocopy of a fax of a photocopied fax.

And by this point, my screen started to fall apart.

Generally, it was a very disappointing night of printmaking, and I’m not really excited about this Scratch-A-Print stuff anymore, although with nine more screens, I’m not about to give up on it totally either. Some simpler line art might work better, and I’ll have to do some Googling to see if I can find any better tips or instructions on printing with the stuff.

Stay tuned. :)