I recently had the opportunity to go to an Andy Warhol exhibit at the University of Utah, and I have to say that it blew me away. Andy Warhol's screen-printed art is absolutely amazing up close. For all of you screen-printers out there I would strongly recommend taking the opportunity if you ever get on to check out his work up close and personal.
My other favorite screen-printer (Seriographer) is Chuck Close. In fact, I use one of his self portraits on the little icon off to the left there. Some of you probably thought that that was me. The painting/screen-prints that Chuck close does are HUGE and utilizes as many an 200 screens.
I find screen-printing history fascinating, although I don't hear a lot about it. I've been looking for a great book on the subject, but haven't been able to find any. Maybe I should write one.
Who are some of your favorite famous screen-printers?
When I lived on Maui I always liked to go to the Martin Lawrence gallery in Lahaina. They had lots of Andy Warhol, Keith Haring ( my favorite ) and Kostabi. I think Kostabi was into painting more than screen printing though. Still amazing stuff. You can see some pictures here:
thats crazy to think of a famous artist to going through the same process as us. that would be interesting to watch the process? anyone know how they do it exactly?
thats crazy to think of a famous artist to going through the same process as us. that would be interesting to watch the process? anyone know how they do it exactly?
Or its rather us going through what they went through.
Chuck Close has great work, especially after his handicap. The way he painted on such large canvas with pulleys to move the canvas up, down, and around with accuracy, that I wouldn't even be able to phantom!
While i'm no Andy, it has long been a hobby of mine to test the boundaries of film, graphic and halftones.
Back in the early 80's. I ran a photo typesetter, which used 12" rolls of b&w photographic paper. Working 3rd shift, i had vast amounts of time and vast amounts of scrap photo paper. One summer i played making pin hole cameras. With just junk laying around, i could easily construct a 10"x14" box camera. What i found cool was how the shape of the pin hole effected all of the shapes and highlights within a photo. With all modern cameras, the aperture is a round circle, but when replaced with a pinhole star, the the entire image starts to take on strange star overtones.
A few years back, i started playing with text to form halftones.
Right now i've got my mind set the more practical problem of producing great process color, which is color correct. Its a whole lot easier to paint Marilyn blue than it is to get her flesh tones correct!
Much like and dislike the pin hole camera, digital halftones have weird abilities to take on characteristics beyond a simple round dot. With todays computers, those shapes should be able to become polymorphic.
NOW is the first time in history that computers are fast enough and output devices good enough that we are able to produce ANYTHING our minds can imagine. IT'S A GREAT TIME TO BE ALIVE!!!
I wish i knew the name of one hero of mine, it is the guy who wrote the program which converts photographs into drawings in the wall street journal. Just looking at the printed paper, the conversions is fantastic!, but most people fail to look at the underlying manipulation. The conversion process not only prints fantastic, it also allows editorial overtones to be added to images, but without being obvious. With simple filter manipulation, the person can be aged 10 years or made younger 10 years. It can make the person appear soft and lovable or harsh and evil. Whoever is responsible for the WSJ photos is a GENIUS!!!!
fred
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A day late, a dollar short, so it goes.
Thanks for the comments thus far, I'm sure others would love to hear more from other users regarding their favorite screen-printers. Keep the comments coming!
is there a plugin that creates that, or did you have to play with the fonts until it looked like that?
The image was generated by a program i wrote. The program is still pretty rough.
To make the image, i placed the image in photoshop, then placed a text layer above the photo and figured out point size, line breaks and leading. Once the text breaks were figured out, my program read in rows of text and the photo. Each character would examine its position in the photograph and choose what font to use. If the background was white, it would choose an extra light font, when it was dark, it would choose an extra bold. The output from my program was a postscript print file, which i could send to any postscript printer, rip or open back up in photoshop.
The idea seems like it could make a nice niche product, but right now i'm too busy to develop the process further.
With how fast todays computers are, programming can generate all sorts of crazy graphics. Historically halftones were limited to lpi screens, but in the world of computers, we are only limited by our imagination.
Right now, my development efforts are concentrating on printing premium quality process color. I've been working with spot functions and ghostscript to produce halftones designed specifically for screen printing.
The problem with round dot halftones is there tendency moire. The problem with line halftones is they are to thin. Last week i was testing with exaggerating the EllipseB spot funcions and exaggerate it to morph quicker into a line.
/EllipseB
{ dup 5 mul 8 div mul exch dup mul exch add sqrt 1 exch sub }
/ElongatedEllipse
{ dup 2 mul 16 div mul exch dup mul exch add sqrt 1 exch sub }
The elongated ellipse is a good start, but its just a starting point. With todays computers, it is now possible to produce film only dreamed about in the pre-computer days. With ghostscript being distributed in source code, the groundwork has already been laid.
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While not screen printing, how about a halftone printed using crop circle technology?
Favorite Screen-Printed Images 
