adrift silkscreen

I made this piece as a way to explore the silkscreen medium. As with all my illustrations, I started out with a rough thumbnail sketch. Compositionally, I wanted it to resemble a graphic novel page, with panels separating narrative structures. I intended this to be a page of an ongoing short graphic novel, and will make new pages following the narrative of this piece soon. For this particular page, it represents the changing of the seasons, swaying branches surrounding a lone fisherman. 

After the thumbnail, I moved on to a rendered ink drawing of the piece on watercolour paper. Once the inking was complete, I scanned the drawing and coloured the piece digitally to separate all the colour layers for silkscreening.

This illustration is composed of three layers: black, yellow, and red. I printed out each layer to expose the silkscreen to each of the colours and then manually lined and squeegeed each colour of ink through the exposed mesh of the screen to layer all the colours of ink on top of each other. This was an incredibly tedious process as each layer of colour needed its own exposed screen, and had to be lined up together with all the colour layers to create a complete illustration. 

But the texture and look of silkscreen is like no other. The ink of each layer is slightly raised on the surface of the paper and gives a woodblock print effect, which is very suitable to the Asian style of this illustration.