David Stafford

[stephanie blake]

Valentine's/ Chinese New Year Greeting

[Carina Granlund]

Watersnake arrived in Finland too! Thank you David.

[Carina Granlund]

Thanks David. Hope we'll se more of your and Patti's prints, you are a great team!  So glad you find my site, not much new going on right now...

[David Stafford]

Thanks, Carina. Yes, water is essential and here in the Southwest where we have less and less of it, screenprinting feels like a sinful extravagance but...we had to try it. Patti used a photo emulsion which she exposed with a regular 150 watt bulb. The kit is fairly primitive as are our skill levels so that accounts for the misregistration of the plates which I kind of like. When we put the first color down my heart sank because somehow I felt like we had landed in an art program for the developmentally disabled but with each color I came to appreciate the variation from print to print (caused mostly by our ineptitude) and by the last color I really liked the way the variables come together. By the way, I came across your art site (via Marie Wintzer's blog) and I was impressed. I love your drawings. Here's one last pic featuring the watersnake we made for the Chinese New Year.

[Carina Granlund]

Thank you, David, for great process photo, and words about The Watersnake! Love it.  I'm also very drawn to screenprinting, but I haven't any proper water sink in my studio and the idea of working with screenprinting has always stranded there. Did you do the snake with photo emulsion or a "regular stencil"? Like how the red color overlaps the yellow...

[David Stafford]

A picture of Patti during the making of the watersnake cards

[David Stafford]

Thanks for blogging, Stephanie. A few words about the water snake: This was a joint undertaking by Patti and me, mostly Patti actually. A couple of months ago we bought one of those Speedball screenprinting kits which Patti used to make a commemorative t-shirt and we were casting about for another project and came up with the Water Snake / Valentine. Neither of us had really done much screenprinting before so this was our maiden voyage and it shows in the wide variability of results we got. But that's really what I liked the most. As most of you know I don't like to repeat myself but I found that every one we pulled was different in some odd happy accident sort of way. And of course the backs are all different. On this one, I like the way a thoughtful postal person hand cancelled the stamp so it doesn't wreck the caption. I also like the way the red paint interacted with the slick surface to produce that wholly accidental corrugated modeling. So that's the snake story. Happy New Year!