Our friend delta_v is back once more with another impressive project. Some time ago, he created this excellent piece of art reminiscent of the game Disco Elysium, which shows a flock of Valbarans thinking together as a Consensus.
I liked this one a lot, and he clearly did too, because he decided to send me physical print of the piece, which I have framed for display.
And here’s a clearer view of the print without my phone camera and the reflective glass getting in the way.
Rather than being done with a digital printer, this process was carried out by hand using a method called Screen Printing. Each layer is a different color, with the image separated into cyan, magenta, yellow, and black layers that all come together to produce the end result. It took about thirty attempts to produce something of the fidelity you see above. (Click to enlarge.)
A transparency of the artwork is first created, which is then exposed beneath screens coated with a light-sensitive resin.
The transparent images are then exposed to UV light beneath the screens, hardening the resin coating, but not in the areas that are blocked by the transparency. This creates an imprint of the image on the resin, which can then be used as a kind of stencil.
The exposed screens are then washed out with a pressure washer, leaving behind a kind of photo negative of the original image.
Now that the stencil is ready, the ink can be applied. Colored ink is pushed through the stencil onto paper using a squeegee, which is repeated for all four of the colors. It can take between four to six hours for each layer to dry, which means that the process has to be carried out over a period of several days.
The end result is an accurate, reproducible transfer of the image.
