The first screen print I tried to make was a showprint. I looked at the 'fine art' serigraphy that was being done both at my school and what I could find in the pre-internet research days, and found that I was much more energized by great gig posters for band's I'd never heard. So I set out to create the awesomest most complicated 6 or 8 color print including three 2 color split fountains to increase the number of colors on the page to a gazillion. I started with the university standard 15 sheets in my edition, but by the time I got to the third color I had misprinted so many that the edition had shrunk to less than 3. Lesson learned...don't run before you can walk.
I don't have any images of this first, radically unsuccessful print, as I was not real proud of the outcome, and I made it in the days before I realized the importance of documentation.
It looks simple enough, the blending 2 or 3 colors in a screen to create the 'split fountain' or 'rainbow roll'. (I like split fountain better, it makes me sound fancy.) The problem wasn't actually printing the split fountain, it was trying to manage too many variables at once, while still trying to master the most basic ones, like registration.
I stopped printing around color 5 or so. The bad registration coupled with my unsure squeegee hand and countless other principles I had yet to even consider resulted in an edition that I would use for proofing paper for the rest of the semester. There may still be one of these ridiculously complicated unfinished prints for a forgotten band at a shuttered venue somewhere, I sometimes run across forgotten things that I've time capsuled in this portfolio or that drawer. I think it might have been the last time i bought rag paper too...
Anyhow, I no longer feel that the perfect showprint has to involve as many colors as a tie-dye or that every word I can think of should go into the design. These days, when I design a print, more time and energy goes into taking things off and simplifying than went into every aspect of my first screen print from the drawing to the drying. It makes everything better from the burning of minimal numbers of screens to the forced design economy of 2 colors. Don't get me wrong, I still like to do the odd 4 or 5 color print to have fun and to be a little extravagant, but like Cap'n Velasquez says "if she don't look good in one color, she don't look good."
