As a personal project I wanted to experiment with screen printing as this is something that I have been enjoying over the past few years, but I have not had the chance or time to do ay personal projects. With this in mind I set out to produce some prints. I decided to take my inspiration from festivals and nights out I go to which are decorated heavily with psychedelic UV wall hangings and trippy art-work, this has been something which has always interested me from a young age...bright garish colours that glow in the dark! I wrote myself a brief to give me some sort of guidelines to follow, but the main thing I aimed to get out of the project was to improve my screen printing skills.
The Brief - The Mushroom Forest
Create a UV reactive screen print, taking inspiration from psychedelic artwork, with the theme being directed towards woodland critters. The illustration style must be hand rendered rather than digital lines this fits better with the psychedelic free flowing ethos behind this style of artwork.
Mandatory Requirements
A2 format
UV Reactive
Screen Prints
Inspiration
I have taken inspiration from many different aspects. But mainly from festival art and stage set ups and various events, these kind of night time raves use lots of UV light and UV reactive paint to create magical environments which throws so many different things at you. I wanted to create a trippy mushroom forest, inspired by the magical festival atmosphere and my love for animals.
Tomorrow Land
Secret Garden Party
This is a perfect example of the kind of imagery and experiences
that has inspired me. This looks magical.
Rainbow City
Lisa Kelleher
UV ART
Trippy Forest
Shiva
Mushroom Land
Neon Style Mushroom Land
Design Process
Initial Sketch
In order to stick with the psychedelic theme I wanted to create a trippy mushroom forest, I started to think about all the creatures that could be affected by eating these wild hallucinogenic mushrooms in nature. Its said that loads of sheep trip balls from eating Magic Mushrooms. I wanted to create an illustration showing other woodland critters off there nut. I took inspiration from festivals set ups, where they have giant mushrooms and creepy animals etc. I decided to go with spiders, lizards, frogs, hedgehogs and mice.
I drew this using 2 different weight pens, a marker for the thicker edges and a berol for the finer detail. After several hours of drawing I had finally finished. It was a relief to complete it as it was on to the fun bit.
Digital Colour Experiments
In order to get an idea of how the image would look with some colour I scanned in my illustration onto my mac then Live traced the Image in Illustrator and then used the bucket tool to add colour to the design. I tried out many variations to see what worked best. Sampling the drawing with different amounts of colour.
I was not a fan of the background colour
This was something a little bit different, Quite like the
purple orange combo, looks dated.
I came up with this version which I quite like,
It almost looks like an X-Ray and slightly 3D
The Pink was a little bit too dark here and the purple wasn't quite right
Quite an interesting combination but the yellow didn't do it for me.
All wrong
One of my favourite designs. The right balance between the colours.
Nice combo
Reggae Inspired
This definitly worked the best I feel. The black gives a nice contrast against the others. I will not be able to recreate these colours exactly when mixing the paints but will work on a similar colour scheme. It was quite a fun process digitalising my drawing but also time consuming, there would definitely be a quicker option for next time. As changing the colours for each image took forever. I have since then been shown a way to Change the entire colour palette at once which is a big help.
Screen Prints
Black Outline Print
I decided to run a couple of outline versions as well as
the colour ones to get a bit of variation in the prints
Gradient Print
I messed about using different paint at once, this came out with some
pretty random out comes, I like how it isn't perfect, Reminds me of skittles.
5 Colour UV Print
The 5 colour screen prints worked really well eventually. Overall the screen printing took me around 3 days. I did a run of 25 5 colour prints, 4 black and, 4 gradients. I think this was a ambitious effort and I really did not expect it to take aslong as it did, but there were many errors along the way. The first lot of paint was too thick so it set in the screen pretty much straight away. Then I managed to mix the wrong colour which set me back some more. But once I had finally got to grips with everything the process became smoother, and after the first couple of layers were down I had gotten into the swing of things and managed to get them all done by the third day. I am really happy with how they have turned out, I think 5 colours was fairly ambitious as it was tough to get the registration right ascross all 5 layers, but I managed to pull it off. The layers dont match up exactly but thats the good thing about screen printing, everyone is different. The patches where they don't meet up has resulted in white showing through which gives the drawing an extra layer essentially and also gives the image a minor 3D quality.
Here is the print under UV light, the photo is not the best as my camera is not up to scratch but you can see how the colours glow brightly, It definitely comes to life under this light, I feel I have created a psychedelic piece which matches up to current designs, I have applied my own style but stuck with the conventional methods. The one problem was that the blue paint is not UV reactant which lets the image down slightly. But we learn from our mistakes. I will take on board all my errors and improve for next time.
FINAL BOARDS
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