Learning Screen Printing in Liège

In that alchemical way that Lisa and I seem good at together, we conjured up a last minute introductory screen printing workshop here in Liège this morning, with Alain Preud’homme.

You’d think that either of us might have accidentally learned the basics of screen printing by this point in our lives, but no. It is the ham radio to relief printing’s personal computing: we know any each other, but we don’t hang out in the same bars.

Alain shares a well-equipped studio with two other printmakers of L’Atelier du Coin, Fifi et Bernbard Louis, and he offers a variety of introductory approaches. Our request: give us a cook’s tour so we can see if we want to explore farther at home. And that’s exactly what he did.

We learned about making transparencies, exposing the emulsion, cleaning the screens, flooding the screen with ink, and the mysterious and subtle art of pulling the ink over the screen with the squeegee.

We finished the day with a dozen prints, using an image that started as a lino print co-created by Alain and his son. It was all great fun, in a stimulating space. We emerge with a basic understanding of the basics.