Learning Screenprinting

I took an art class at Hyde Park Art Center in person this April and May titled “Screenprinting for Social Justice” taught by Aaron Hughes (who’s also member of Just Seeds Artists’ Cooperative!)

It was my first time “officially” doing screenprinting (previous experience was bootlegging CDs haha) and it was soo much fun. i loved the tactile + manual experience of it all.

We made three different prints, the main rules were that it should be around social justice + single , double, and triple colors respectively. I also varied the sizes, making the first one half letter size, second full-letter size, and third one legal size

The first print was a quick design I came up with in class! The teacher encouraged us to make a text-based design and to make different versions of the drafts

The second print i wanted to make in service/honor of land defender Marco Antonio Suástegui from Oaxaca Mexico who was murdered in April. He successfully organized his community against a neoliberal water dam project that would’ve caught off water access to his community. I donated most of these prints to a local group that had connections with this organizer. You can read more about his story here

The third one was the one I rushed through the most. I didn’t plan the layers well (my first one!) so i ended up having to block out some of the screen to get them in the right order haha. The final print ended up looking a bit unfinished and also was impacted by the screens still having some of the previous designs on them and me not being familiar with the ink’s transparency for different colors lol. So I ended up drawing over them with posca + acrylic markers and loved the final products 🙂