Screen Printing Tutorial Part 2: Creating a Printing Screen

Step 5 Painting the image onto the screen with glue (2)

Use a paint brush to carefully paint a thin layer of fabric (non-water-soluble) glue onto any areas of the screen through which you do not want ink to go. In this case, I want to print the white parts of my image, so I filled the black parts with glue. However, if you want to print the black parts of your image, you need simply do the reverse i.e. fill all the white parts of your image with glue.

It's important to ensure that the material of the screen is not touching the surface on which you are working, otherwise you will end up glueing the screen to the surface! You can switch to a finer brush to paint thin lines & detailed parts of the image, & use a thicker brush to apply glue to larger areas of the screen, including a border of 1-2 inches outside the outline of your image.

Once you have filled all the black (or white) parts of the screen with a thin layer of glue, set the screen aside (propped upright so that it doesn't stick to anything) & allow to dry before turning over & repeating the process on the other side. (It isn't strictly necessary to repeat the glue-painting process on both sides of the screen, but I find that it results in a crisper print & a more durable screen which can be re-used over & over again.)

Once the screen is completely dry, it is ready to use to make a print of your image, which I'll describe how to do in the next & final tutorial in this series.