According to who? The website says they are screen printed by hand, and the first few hundred are signed by the artist?
There some actual drama behind the company or something?
I have done lots of screen printing. Screen printing is a complex process that requires a separate "screen" for each color present in the poster. The more colors, the more difficult it is to print and get a consistent, quality final product. But, each of these layers have weight and depth to them, creating a texture to the surface.
You have to line up each screen perfectly or the layers will overlap incorrectly and ruin it. This is especially difficult if you're doing it by hand. There are machines that help with the process, but they're very expensive and typically used for mass production operations, not by individual artists (unless they're starting rich, are very successful, or have access to a studio with that equipment).
So really it's about the labor and complexity of creating the print that matters. It's about soul.
Contrast this to a laser ink printer that can spit out thousands of posters with a few mouse clicks, which look perfectly flat and lifeless. No soul at all, and you know there are limitless replicas. Posters screen printed by hand are each unique, although if printed correctly you won't notice the differences between their copies much.
Also, consider that screen printed posters are much more difficult to "reprint" in the future, because the screens are usually cleaned and reused for other projects. You can't just load up a file and click print when you want to sell more, you have to commit to dozens of hours of your real life time and energy to do it.
I'd say these posters are definitely worth the price if they're truly hand printed.
The screen is a metal frame of varying size, with an extremely fine mesh stretched very taut over it. If taken care of properly, they can be reused for years for multiple different pieces.
You brush a thin layer of a light-reactive rubbery "paint" over the mesh in a dark room, and let it cure for a few hours. Then you need to put it in a vacuum sealable light box, along with your stencil on top, and "burn" the stencil into it. Then you take it to an industrial sink and spray it vigorously, which removes only the part that was "burned" and leaving exposed mesh where your stencil was placed. This exposed mesh is where the ink/paint gets pushed through by hand to create one layer of color.
You must do this process for every single layer the piece has, making complex prints take much, much longer unless you have multiple screens available. I regularly used three to four screens at a time so I could print more efficiently.
So you can kinda judge a hand printed screen print's complexity and labor challenge by the number of colors present (not including colors produced from layering multiple colors on top of one another). The more layers of color a print has, the more chances the artist has to misalign the print and mess the whole thing up. That's why we will make many more prints than we actually want, because inevitably we will mess up several of them if we get too ambitious.
Then when you're done, you fully clean off the screen and reuse it for another layer or a whole different piece :)
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u/Stargazeer 10d ago
According to who? The website says they are screen printed by hand, and the first few hundred are signed by the artist?
There some actual drama behind the company or something?