Screen Printing with Oak and Walnut paste

Translating my sketches and ideas onto Kodatrace to screen print with natural dye paste has been interesting. It has been a long time since I have done any screen printing and so the first samples and scarves have been a learning curve. It's things like considering size. The dimensions of the scarf are going to have an important affect on the effect of the print and the repeat and I need to go back to Photoshop to plan the layout. The lines representing furrows gave perspective and I had invested in 3 Posca pens from the uni shop so had options to vary thickness etc.

But the thick lines were very heavy and too
dominant. Also need refinement and better
use when combined with the tree and animal shapes. I liked the tracks with the strong tractor tracks and lighter footprints, they were more adaptable. On the third scarf ie the one to the left, I tried masking the images so that I could use them in bands with the track marks, this related more with the tribal work I had seen at the British Museum and more successful I think!

The paste was used by boiling 10 gm oak chips in 1/2 litre of water too extract the dye then sprinkling Indalca on top and stirring vigorously to thicken. This sometimes needs to be whisked and sieved. I also used 20gm walnut husks to make the brown dye paste.
I decided to darken the oak paste by adding a little indigo and this resulted in a black print.

I used the scarves from the previous unit which had been dyed with red onion and walnut. I also had one scarf with a yellow from the leaves of the Tree of Heaven in my garden. This scarf shows how important size and planning is - the images overlap awkwardly, they don't fit the space and you can also see the difference when I added indigo to the oak paste. It will be interesting to see if steaming affects colour density.