Learn screen printing

“Night after night I would take a bus to his studio and learn (of all things, not pottery making but) custom screen printing. [...] The first thing I learned was just how labor intensive the process of screen printing was. For each color I had to cut a separate mask (or stencil), removing selected bits of a plastic block-out sheet I had attached to the nylon screen with adhesive. [...] It was a long, long process, from the inception of my design to the finished stack of screen prints. Night after night I would do this in the ceramic artist’s studio. I appreciated how thick the ink was, and how intense its color was. It was a good education. I never forgot the patience it required.”

“The first time I ever laid my hands on a squeegee I was using water-based screen printing ink at the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design. [...] Since there was no printing press at the time in the studio, we printed “free-hand”– with one person holding the screen while the other person pulled the squeegee (when nobody was around, we used bricks to hold down the screen). This proved to be tricky with the hand-mixed Manutex ink dye, because it was so runny it sometimes “bled” ink where the image was printed.”