Adventures in Screenprinting

Before I left Holstebro to move to Copenhagen, I had the opportunity to get involved at Slagteriet, a local arts collective situated in a vacant slaughterhouse building (see Koncertsal). I used the slaughterhouse’s screen printing facilities to finally realise a shirt design that I had been wanting to create for a while.

In 2014 I visited friends in Tallinn, Estonia, and while on a trip to the Estonia Mining Museum we passed by an old “technology park” along the side of the highway. It had tall, somewhat crumbling concrete walls with a very unique design spray-painted on every other wall panel:

The Russian lettering is somewhat faded (there’s a line of red characters barely visible above the black text) but it reads as follows:

Внимания
‘территория
автобазы
охраняется
собаками’

Warning
‘Territory (of)
auto base
protected (by)
dogs’

The image of the barking guard dog had been hand-made from a stencil and was amazingly detailed. This was one of the most ferocious dogs I’d ever seen on a sign, and also it was disturbingly muscular – unless the lines in its neck were meant to resemble fur? I wonder if the artist used an image as reference or made it from their own design…

I wanted to share this beautiful image with a wider audience, so I chose it as the design for my first screen-printed shirt. This was the result:

Close-up, I used a two-layer application of ink. The first layer used a combination of yellow, purple, pink, blue, and green inks to create a rainbow effect. I waited for this layer to dry, and then ran another layer of black ink overtop with a slight offset. The result was a mostly-black shirt from a distance, but with highlights of colour when viewed up close.

I made a limited run of six shirts for friends, with each print being unique in its mixture of colours and offset. For a first run, the result was highly successful!

And the sign didn’t lie… it was guarded by dogs!