Currency Design - production

Producing this piece of work has taken more than it was primarily thought, mostly because of the difficulty of preparing valid positives to properly expose a design like this using a screen printing method.

The first method that was tried was isolating the channels CMYK in Photoshop and exporting them individually to then be printed.

This method not only didn't work very well, as some areas of the screen weren't properly exposed, but also the lines used in the design were too thin to be correctly represented.

For the next positive preparation I made the same process but with the lines a bit thicker and spaced. This was tried in the printer in the studio, which didn't print it very well, and the one in the library, which gave better results.

A second screen was used for this try but again, it didn't work quite well. The screen for the cyan didn't come out very well and the one for the black didn't come out at all. The staff from the print room who was with me during the process, tried to fix it in photoshop, but after trying they told me to speak to one of the experts in front of the library and to tell them to print it out at 300 dpi.

One of them taught me how to print it from illustrator and even told me something very interesting I didn't know about, which is to control the angle of how the colours are printed.

After doing this, the new positives looked more crisp and contrasted, but one of the members of the staff wasn't very sure about the black and the cyan. So he took the prints to make a photocopy of them so it would be look darker.

After exposing them, the one that failed again was the black. So, in another and smaller screen, I exposed the black but I set the exposing machine at 140 instead of 170 units. This finally made the black screen come out as expected.

The paper I used for the prints is somerset white satin, following the recommendations I got in the feedback sessions and looking for something with some weight to emphasise the handmade touch.

I printed then the CMYK colours in each piece I cut (21x26). I had some of them as testing papers for the first prints of each colour to see if everything was coming out all right, but with the black I stopped at some point because it  looked much better and clean without it.

The piece of work I'd like to take to the exhibition is printed in CMY (without black on purpose).