An endless array of unfinished projects

I realize the difference between being young and old is that when I was younger I worked intensly on a project and became obsessed with the tools and skills related to a subject until I moved on to another subject. Now that I am older I have every project that I have ever worked on going on simultaneously and my concentration is limited due to the amount of time I can spend on each thing. I feel that at some point all of these different hobbies will merge into an opus thus allowing me to move on to something totally new.

Airbrushing is the new talent I am delving into and it seems really cool. I've spent my entire life rejecting this skill for more graphic, hard-lined, types of printing
like screen printing. I've been using spray paint and making stencils with laser cutting and wire mesh screens, however, I was reluctant to do too much since the spray paint stinks and gives me a headache eventhough I wear a mask. The idea of water-based inks not causing a toxic cloud while I worked attracted me slowly to the air brush equipment at the art store. Now I've got an assortment of inks for textiles and I think I'm going to accentuate various black lined screen print designs with air brushed highlights.

Screen printing is basically making a stencil, so the first thing I worked on was coating a wire mesh screen with emulsion. Needless to say it was a huge mess, but I managed to get a 4" X 5" rectangle photographic stencil of Obama. Ts encouraged me to go further and I restretched the screens and spend several days making the emulsion thicker.

Cranked out some samples today

Photos of new samples attached randomly in this post.

Waiting to the last minute to complete jobs is not the best policy, but I have been reworking my pallets and doing much of the prep work myself to keep the ship afloat. I created a template screen with grid lines vertically and horizontally separated by an inch" in both directions creating a grid. Then I printed water based acrylic ink through the screen onto the pallets to identify if any of the platens were out of whack. Lo and behold I could find about a 1/3rd inch difference from the main / control platen.

This explained the problem that is compounded if I register a print on one pallet that is off in one direction by 1/3rd of an inch and then printed in a round-robin fashion as is standard then when I hit a pallet off by 1/3rd inch in another direction I could be off as much as 2/3rd of an inch. Not good. Now that I have identified the bad pallets I can either trim the edges to make them square or re-attach the brackets to attempt to straighten them in place. I suggest making this type of screen for repeated use just to keep an eye on things. The new screen made centering the design much easier too.

Once these arrangements were done I quickly pumped out sample t-shirts for several custom jobs, like a 1, 2, 3, 4....photos attached.