Waxed Paper and Spray Mount

Since the thinner black ink didn't work out so well with the newspaper, and I'm looking for a better way to stick down the stencil before the first pass of ink, I decided to try spray mounting waxed paper to my screen.

Since I just wanted to see if it worked, I just cut a quick design, with both larger and smaller pieces of wax paper:

[ waxed paper stencil ]

I then went to work on spray mounting the waxed paper onto the screen.

[ spray mount! ]

Since the waxed paper is pretty thin, it was actually fairly difficult to manage. With the adhesive on the waxed paper, the extra weight pulled areas unsupported by my hands down to the screen before I was ready to place it. It's not normally a big deal for me to pull things up and replace them with the spray mount, but the waxed paper ripped easily. Something sturdier would definitely make a big difference (acetate maybe?).

[ largest piece mounted on screen ]

The biggest piece of waxed paper definitely ended up quite wrinkly, and I was worried about ink maybe squeezing into some of the wrinkles (didn't really happen, though). I figured I should let the spray mount set up completely before trying to use my screen. I was just going to wait overnight, but it was a few days before I got around to actually printing. I am sure waiting a day would be enough time, though.

[ printed design ]

I decided to just print on extra newspaper since I was just testing the method and I didn't care about the design anyway. I was actually surprised at how well this worked. I may also be getting better at judging the amount of ink I need and am getting much better at covering the area in one pass.

I did have a couple problems, the first of which has happened before, and could probably happen anytime, no matter what I do. I accidentally got some extra ink on the underside of the ink, or there was a glob and it squeezed out underneath my stencil.

[ squeezed out! ]

The second problem was that there was an area of the screen where the ink would not pass through, since it was blocked by some extra spray mount from a heavy coating and repositioning. I was able to rub some of it off, but it was dried and stuck to the screen.

[ blocked by dried spray mount ]

So, I'd say the waxed paper and spray mount was only a partial success. Yes, the waxed paper held up well, but it was really hard to lay down where I wanted to, which was part of the idea of spray mounting it in the first place. The spray paint worked well, but became troublesome if I got some in areas I wanted the ink to pass through.