Farrow & Ball has teamed up with Print Club London to create a series of limited edition silk screen prints for their Christmas windows. Three of the east London-based Print Club artists have created scenes inspired by the festive season using Farrow & Ball paints, from the perky birds by Chris Andrews above to a hand-drawn scene of St Paul’s by Clare Halifax and swimming carps in a misty pool of water by Lucille Clerc (scroll down to see more).
Last week I was invited to a screen printing workshop along with other bloggers at Print Club London, just off Stoke Newington Road in Dalston, to meet the artists and have a go ourselves. I had previously done some screen printing with Thornback & Peel at SMUG’s workshop in Angel (see post here) so I was pretty confident with what to do. The hard bit had already been done for us: coming up with the design, prepping and washing the screens. We just got to do ‘the muscle work’, swiping the squeegee at a 45 degree angle with a steady pressure. Our prints – simplified versions of the artists’ work – came out really well and even got signed by the artists at the end of the session. It was such a fun evening, and I’ll definitely be signing up for another workshop there very soon.
Below: Clare Halifax prepares the bench for the first print. She tapes the area so she knows exactly where to place each clean piece of paper and the screen itself.
Below: The Farrow & Ball paint is mixed with a screen printing medium to thicken it up
And then the easy bit was left to us non-artists: simply swiping the squeegee along the screen and pretending we had done all the work…
Et voila! Not bad for amateurs I’d say…
Print Club London offer workshops at their East London studio for as little as £50 for a day for beginners.
And the finished pieces (the artists’ versions of course)… above: Follow Your Dreams, They Know The Way by Lucille Clerc below: Swallows Soaring At St Paul’s by Clare Halifax
Images courtesy Farrow & Ball and myself
