I Love Screenprinting: Week Four

Time flies when you are having fun. So, my last week at I Love Screenprinting is finished and I must admit, that I am both relieved and kind of sad that I am finished. It was a great four weeks filled with a lot of learning, interesting people, projects, experience food and times. 

So I thought I would make some top 5 lists of things from my time at I Love Screenprinting:

 

Top 5 things that I enjoyed:

1. Takura's Morning Mealie Meal: Peanut Butter FTW

2. The smell of fresh metallic gold ink and clearbase: Almost like marzipan with extra fabnizz

3. The pressure washer when it's cranked all the way up: It's cathartic, trust me

4. The way that ghost images build up on screens over time

5. My cycle from Vredehoek to Saltriver: All the different smells, buildings, people, too good

My shoes have had it.

Top 5 things that I learnt:

1. Pansy hands + Screenwash = Skin Loss: Extreme Exfoliation

2. 300 DPI CMYK. Get it right, so many 'designers' don't.

3. You can practically 'gun' anything out as long as the fabric isn't white.

4. Separations are so much more than just separations.

5. Lunch is the most important meal of the day.

Top 5 things that I didn't enjoy all that much:

1. Falling off of the tall bike.

2. Having to strip and paste screens via my pansy keyboard hands.

3. Really big, repetitive runs: It's in the nature of the business

4. Making mistakes which are real: "Where are these inky fingerprints from?!"

5. Realising just how awkward my motor skills were in the beginning.

So yeah, to conclude, I am very happy that I spent my time the way that I did. I learnt alot, not just about graphic design or screenprinting or whatever, but about what it is to be involved in a small business, what it is too be a young person in Cape Town in 2010, regardless of background and about a million other things that I would have never been able to have thought of when I started there, a month ago. Oh and also that a tablespoon of peanut butter really can make a bowl of mealie meal all that much better! I ended off my time at I Love Screenprinting on a real high note. I also came off my bicycle on the way there on friday morning. I hit a patch of oily water. did some interpretative steering and then decided to go feel the curb on the otherside of the road with my hands real good. Rad, now I can't cut a piece of bread.

So have my hands + wrist

bye bye

Mike