Sally Davis

I attended my first conference in April (2013), which I found both inspiring and enjoyable.

I also enjoyed the workshop on Saturday, which was about the process of Riso screen-printing. This article is about my personal perspective, and what I learned about the simplification of images for printing. I felt that what I learned would also be useful for other types of printing for example lino prints, and screen printing on textiles.

I had little idea of what Riso screen-printing entailed, but I took some images with me. The instructions were that the image should be black and white with good contrast. I had some photographs on a memory stick with what I thought were clear contrasts. The following images are to show how the photograph that I chose was manipulated to make it suitable for a riso screen. The finished riso screen is a sophisticated stencil that has enamel drawn across it like the ink on a screen print, and thus needs to have the image reduced to darks and lights, which still convey the meaning of the image.

The original photo was in colour – you can see the development of the image below