The Warmth of Loneliness
This illustrative screen print was made during quarantine and I had a lot of time to reflect on what it means to be alone in a home. While many, myself included, struggled with isolation, loneliness, and mourning familiarity of routine and people around me. But at the same time, I felt a stillness and peace that I never had the time for before COVID. In this piece, I wanted to depict a world that reflected that comfort I felt in the loneliness.
Ideation
Like usual, I started with a few thumbnail sketches…
Let’s get to printing!
Since we were still mostly isolating, I had to get creative without a proper screen printing studio and equipment. This mostly meant giant dye buckets in the bath tub and coming up with a makeshift screen print surface. In order to get a clean, even inking with screen printing, there can’t be any wrinkles or creases in the fabric. In order to achieve that on such a large piece of cotton, on a proper screen printing surface, a cushioned fabric surface would be beneath the fabric to 1) pin and stretch the fabric taut and 2) to catch any ink that bleeds through. But I was confined to an apartment with cheap linoleum floors. My solution was cutting up a trash bag that would go underneath the cloth to catch ink bleed. Then I took a s**t load of painters tape and used that to stretch the fabric taught and to block out larger areas in order to ink the smaller shapes and areas with the mini screen I used to apply ink.
Sylvester
The Tape Monster
Exhibit A for all the tape I used! At the end I balled up all the tape I used for screen printing and the final size of Sylvester was about the diameter of a bowling ball.