Process (silkscreening "Winter Cars")

I'm taking a  silkscreening class at the wonderful Society of Northern Alberta Print-Artists (SNAP) just down the street from our apartment. This is my second screen printing class there in two years and I think I'm getting the hang of it.

Anyway, here's the project.

I wanted to do something winter- and Edmonton-related.

I walk the neighborhood streets for exercise and I take photos as I walk. And I thought, "Cars with snow on them."

And that's it.

Here are the unedited photos.

The cropped photos. I did the composition and color work in Photoshop.

Swapped out a couple cars.

Black and white.

Reducing the photos to individual shades using the Curves pallet. Posterizing. Here's the pallet.

Here's the picture with the posterized look.

Making the background color cutout by using Photoshop's paths.

Making seps. Two grays, one black and one background color of light blue.

Light gray.

Darker gray.

Black.

Background blue.

Okay -- I decided to do a three-color print first to see how it was looking. But I still wanted four shades. So I did the black in solid, and dots for the darker gray.

Here's the Photoshop proof all the colors.

Here's two colors actually screen printed. Starting with the light blue. I'm printing on an 8.5 by 11 -inch (21.59 by 27.94 cm) sticker-back paper.

And the screen print of three colors.

Here's a close-up of the Photoshop proof.

Here's a close-up of the printed piece. That's some serious dot-gain!

So, we've gone from real world, into digital photos into Photoshop, out into the real world for silk screening and then finally, back into the computer for this blog post. Whew!

Next challenge: The four-color version on good paper.