What is up everybody Matt with Mikey Designs here today we're going to talk
about how to expose your screens and wash them out stick around will show you
how it's done
welcome back everybody we're in the darkroom and I'm in the process of
exposing some screens here are our our unexposed screen we have some here that
we already exposed and in the process I thought I would show you guys how we go
about exposing our screens we're in our darkroom which is technically our whole
shop we just have this portion of its setup we have the overhead light off and
I have my yellow safe lights going and here's our exposure unit it is a vacuum
tabletop exposure unit but we'll talk about some other less expensive option
set and some of you guys starting out can do but this case we do have a vacuum
tabletop exposure unit and just want to make sure that your surface is really
clean so we're putting down some Windex and then I'm just gonna take some paper
towels and make sure this thing is nice and
clean any dust on your exposure unit will end up being a pinhole in your
screen so a little bit of time you take here expose the each screen save you
time taking off pinholes on the press
okay we're gonna let that air dry for just a moment okay now that that's air
dry I have an unexposed screen sitting on on the table top exposure yeah I'll
grab a piece of film here and we do not have a tray lock system or anything like
that we basically Center our film onto the
screen and we'll have to show you how we go about registering our jobs but
essentially we use these Center marks we print the white base down make sure it's
Center on the press where we want it to print and then we line the rest of our
screens up with that so I'm just going to put a couple pieces of scotch tape
down so that's all I really need this is pretty quick when you're doing multiple
screens and we're gonna flip this guy over and just as a quick note where you
are exposing your screens to make sure that beam emulsion side of your film is
down touching the screen you can tell with your film this will be your slick
side and with the tacky side down up against your screen so we're gonna flip
this guy around in this particular case we're using adult care emulsion because
we do have half tones so we're gonna go ahead and lock this down excuse me it's
Lowell difficult holding a camera and doing this and in our case for us three
minutes and 30 seconds works the best so we're gonna vacuum this down
okay our screen has finished exposing so we're gonna take this and we're going to
set it in the wash out now the first thing you want to do is you want to wet
now prefer to go back and forth between each side just to keep our constant just
to constantly keep it wet the reason being for that if you only wet the back
side a little bit and keep working on the front you'll find that sometimes you
have a little bit harder overtime
washing your screens up it was kind of helps break down the unexposed emulsion
a little quicker
once it starts the Molson does start to break down a little bit I would stop
rinsing the back and focus solely on the front you can actually see our image in
the screen that's the unexposed emulsion so there's a couple ways you can go
about doing this I do recommend just using a garden hose
you need somewhat high pressure but you don't want to go too crazy especially if
you have half-tones because you can wash some of those halftone details out if
you expose your screen properly you can use a power washer so I'm going to show
you both of these methods
you see our image starting to fall out
because we don't have this graphic get at the bottom and rotate around I'm
somewhat of a tall guy so it makes me it makes it easier for me to just flip this
around a little bit
okay it's looking pretty good going to look over my image make sure I
miss anything
looks like we missed a little bit and the a right there
and last but not least my information that I said on the page that way I know
what color this is because this is going to be a spot process job okay you think
we're all set looks pretty good you can see the halftone dots in there you can
see them down here at the bottom as well flip this right now the next thing I'm
going to do I'm going to give it a little bit of light rinse back - right -
hard because we do have half tones here we're working with don't want to blow
out any of my image
just make whatever of all of our unexposed emulsion now the next thing
I'm going to do is dry the inside of the emulsion or excuse me the exposed screen
were the police exposed part of the emulsion that's going to be and I'm just
going to set that on the inside the screen I'm just using some old newspaper
that generally gets tossed out anyways but we we reuse these sheets and and let
them drive it's that way we're not wasting too much paper if you have
compressed air that's a great way to go we don't have any compressed air in our
shop so this is our left and actually setting you Llano directions to actually
use unprinted newsprint but we have printed newsprint sometimes the print
can transfer to the back but it's not that big of a deal so there you go now
I'm just gonna set this aside and let it dry
okay up next we have the power washer method let's get our power washer going
and I'm not gonna get too close with this there are half times so I don't
want to hit it for too long that way I'm not blowing on my half-tones
but like I said if it's properly exposed and you use the correct emulsion it will
be just fine
and let's take a look at the results see if I do this thing to focus you've got
our the towels they're our half tones washed up pretty nicely you can still
see these very fine half tones and hung in there our fire is looking pretty good
so there you have it everything washed out nice looks pretty good the power
washer method well guys I hope this video was helpful I have some more
screens I got to wash out so I'm gonna get back to it as always remember to
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