OUIL603 - Out Of Order

To keep myself interested in this project I aimed to learn something different from screen printing, as this design as the process so far had been relatively simple. In an effort to emphasise the bright and luminous colours I usually marble prints with I aimed to print onto a black stock.

I made two separate attempts to print the edition how I had planned, unfortunately it all fucked up quite a lot. Before printing I asked the print room staff a few questions about printing colour onto black card / paper. It was very simple, all I needed to do was print a white layer before registering and printing my second layer. Printing the white layer is where the problem arose, the very expensive black card I'd bought and trimmed to size would't take the white ink at all well, leaving the both layers looking rather distressed.

At first I thought this texture across the print was quite nice (even though I knew it was a happy mistake) and that the print still clearly showed the shape of the crayfishes. Each in the edition of ten unique prints also had the red colour I was aiming for somewhere in the marble - with reference to it's name - 'The Red Crayfish Swamp'.

Being a member of the hanging team for the exhibition I was able to help curate and hang everybody's work. When mine was hung my heart sunk a little as I found the mistakes to be horribly obvious, this started a chain of things that I hate about the image not least being the design. It is ugly, blocky and badly printed. I am also irritated by the ideas behind the image, what's a red crayfish got to do with 'Out of Order'?

Nevertheless I enjoyed the exhibition opening night and got a chance to discuss my work with Andy. Originally planning to impress Andy and Becky with new work I knew I'd sort of failed before we spoke. Andy said exactly what I thought he would: my work last year was clean and simply designed whereas this is a bit more messy. I asked Andy if he and Becky would take a look at some of my other and more recent work just for an opinion and took a portfolio down the next day. Luckily they liked some of my recent COP work so took on some more prints. 

In overcomplicating the printing process I made a complete mess of this brief. I had high hopes of utilising the exhibition as another get in with the shop, making the owners my audience. I failed to keep to my original plan of designing something cleanly designed and printed. This was also unfortunately a failure in time management, if I had not left my screen printing so close to the deadline I would have had the extra time available to perfect printing colours onto black paper.