About Kate

Kate was first introduced to screen printing whilst creating a fabric collection for an end-of-year fashion show at art college.  She went on to study surface decoration at university and graduated in 1996.  Kate rediscovered her love of screen printing six years ago at Sheffield Print Club and has been creating hand-pulled screen prints ever since.  Her ideas originate from being outdoors in the beautiful countryside of Derbyshire where she lives.  She begins the design process by taking lots of observational photos of landscapes, trees, flowers and hedgerows whilst out walking.  She likes to create vibrant prints that capture the different colours of each season.  The use of colour is her passion and not many of her designs start without having a good idea of a colourway she wants to depict.

 

All of Kate’s designs are hand-drawn in ink and she creates her layers in Adobe Photoshop before heading for Little Canyon, her local print studio, to prepare her screens.  Often the most exciting part of the process is mixing and experimenting with layering to achieve the right colour combination.

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About the screen printing process

 

Screen printing involves creating a stencil on a fine mesh screen, and then pushing ink through with a squeegee to create an imprint of the design on the flat surface beneath.  Simple paper stencils can be used or, to obtain more detail, a stencil design can be exposed onto a screen in a similar way to a photograph by coating the screen with a light-sensitive emulsion.  Each colour requires a separate stencil (or layer) and the image is gradually built up by applying the layers individually.