Today I pulled the first layer of the first screen print in my now fully functional home shop! Considering that the past seven days have been the most unproductive of my adult life, I'm claiming victory! In fairness, I was pretty ill with some sort of super cold but any energy I did have was channeled into a video game that has eaten up over 24 hours of my time and will probably eat another 24 in the near future. The exposing unit worked great. I know I claimed to have done tests but I was really half assed and didn't spend nearly as much time as I should have checking exposure times. It seems to work well at about 15 minutes. If you are used to commercial equipment then 15 minutes is a looooonnng time. However, Mickey and I built this thing, using plans I bought on eBay, in two Sunday afternoons and spent around 300 on the project. Commercial units cost around 2 grand so I think the extra minutes will be a bargain for many years to come.
I was a little concerned about the emulsion when I washed out the screens because it's a little different than what I was used to working with previously. It seemed thin and I wasn't sure it had hardened enough during the exposing time. I did roughly 150 pulls today and it held up sharp and clear for all of them so that's another worry out of the way. The only thing that I forgot to take into account was that my drying rack doesn't actually hold the amount of paper I'm working with for this print so I had to put things on the floor. It's not the best solution but since I am the ONLY PERSON USING THE SHOP (!!!) it doesn't really matter.
Ok, here are pics of a few of the tiny paintings I took to Minas the other week and never posted.....
