Screen Printing: A Working Guide to Techniques, Equipment and Studio

Ink, a mesh, a rubber blade, and a stencil that decides where the ink is allowed to land. The principle has not changed for a very long time, and the things that make one print better than another are still the same things: how well the stencil was made, how flat the screen sits, and how steadily the blade was drawn across it.

This screen printing guide covers the process end to end, along with the practical decisions that sit inside it.

Techniques and Equipment, in the Order They Bite

Most guides are organised by topic, so equipment sits in one chapter and screen printing techniques in another. This one follows the physical order of the work instead, because that is the order in which mistakes get made and the order in which they stop being fixable.

A screen coated unevenly cannot be rescued at the exposure stage. A stencil exposed for the wrong time cannot be rescued during wash-out. A frame mounted flat against the paper cannot be rescued by squeegee technique, however good it is. Each stage inherits every decision before it, which is why a printer with modest equipment and careful preparation beats a well-equipped one in a hurry.

That order also explains why the equipment pages and the technique pages keep pointing at each other. Mesh count is an equipment question until you try to print a halftone, at which point it becomes the whole technique. Ink family is a purchasing decision until a screen blocks halfway through a run. Almost nothing here is cleanly one or the other.

The Studio Behind the Domain

ottoGraphic is the studio name of Otto Dettmer, a graphic artist, illustrator, screen printer and book artist. He graduated in Graphic Design from Bristol Polytechnic in 1991 and completed an MA in Illustration at Kingston University in 1996, after which he began making and publishing screen-printed books — and he is still making and publishing them. The screen printing workshop near Bath that produced the editions catalogued here ran from 2010 until 2019; the practice itself did not end with it.

The work draws on Russian Constructivist design, Polish poster art and Renaissance painting, and it has been shown at artists’ book fairs in London, New York and Germany. In 2019 the studio received the Förderpreis of the Minipresse fair in Mainz for its artists’ books.

The archive of that studio work sits alongside this screen printing guide: the artists’ books, the screen prints, and the editorial illustration. The books are the part worth looking at even if the technical pages are what brought you here, because they show what the process does when nobody is trying to make it efficient: small editions, hand-bound, printed a colour at a time over weeks.

One Thing Worth Knowing Before Buying Anything

The temptation is to buy a press. Presses are visible, expensive and satisfying, and they solve a problem most beginners do not have yet.

The kit that matters at the start is dull, and it moves the result more than any press.

The things that actually limit early work are a second screen, a repeatable exposure time, and enough off-contact. A second screen removes the wait while the first one dries. A tested exposure time removes the most common cause of a ruined stencil. Two millimetres of off-contact removes the smearing that beginners usually blame on their own technique. None of the three costs much, and all three change the results more than any press.

Buy the press later, when the bottleneck is genuinely speed. The studio kit that matters at the start is dull, and it is the part this guide keeps returning to.

None of this is an argument for buying badly. A squeegee with a worn blade and a frame that has gone out of true will cost more time than they ever saved, and both are easier to notice once the basics are in place.

Ink is sold by weight and by base. Ink for screen printing is stocked by suppliers who mix to order, which matters more than brand once a job needs a colour matched twice.

Frequently Asked Questions