Taking my fingers, hands and the rest to a screen-printing workshop at the Inky Fingers studio in the depths of Hackney Wick.
Firstly, creds for the post title to band Yard Act, taken from my favourite non-album track Human Sacrifice. All links open in new windows.
As part of my ongoing artistic and personal development and plans to create unique prints from my photography, I took myself along to a day screen-printing workshop at the Inky Fingers gallery and studio, run by the dynamic due of Ricky Byrne (aka Mesh&Blade) and internationally renowned sweary dog-snogger and JaffaCake eater artist Dave Buonaguidi (aka Real Hackney Dave).
I travel up to London quite regularly, but the combination of the closed mainline railway meant the journey to Hackney Wick incorporated an unusual and new combination of car, parking, train and underground journeys plus an unexpected but enjoyable walk from Stratford. That and a double espresso meant I was well and truly unfrozen and alive for new ideas and experiences before I started.
I’d not screen-printed before but Ricky and Dave were engaging, informative, honest, relaxed-but-professional and supportive and made the whole day a memorable joy; from the lemon-drizzle cake welcome, to the careful packing up of our small edition of beautiful A2 prints on 400gsm paper stock and the help and banter in between. Despite being on the back of the draining culmination of the Voting Schmoting show launch, a day or so before.
The 2-layer prints we produced are quality items, not just souvenirs and I chose my ‘Rodeo Drive’ image which I thought would work well with a single image layer on a colour block. After a few dab tests I went with an orange background with purple image, which can be seen in the photos below. I have a couple of AP’s, one for home and a unique limited edition of 5 signed and numbered prints which will be for sale at some point (follow on socials or just get in touch!)
I’m not going to detail out the whole day, you can get the gist from the selection of images I took below, but the combination of straight-talking, technical nous from Ricky and honest art-business-life advice from Dave, was SO valuable. Thanks guys.
The ‘Rodeo Drive’ image appears in my book ‘USA: Black & White’ available to buy here.