Airbrushing to make a full colour Screen Print

I am lucky I have a four colour carousel for screen printing, if I feel inclined to do dozens of full colour prints! However as I often work in small quantities I also love to use my airbrush to achieve this. I also love the soft blending you get that is hard to achieve with a screen.

I am going to show you how to colour you black line prints this way;

This is my drawing Siani's World! and I have her exposed on a screen Printing with black ink will give me exactly this image.

This is my result a Siani's World Featured Edition She is printed on a piece of Sun Printed homepun cotton
In order to get the Sun Printed background with out it interfering with the image I cut a piece of blockout in the shape of the printed image

Then then sprayed on my sun colour and laid a lace stencil over it to develop in the sun

This is the result

As you can see some of the sun colour has spread under the stencil but this is not a problem as it can actually add some interest and depth to your finished design.

Using my original stencil I printed off four copies onto acetate transparencies You can use paer if you wish to do only a small amount of spraying, however it is a little more difficult to line up your colour seperations.

I decided which areas I needed to cut out based on which colours I would be using in the design In this case it was very simple
1. I cut the areas on the first one that I needed for skinn tone ie; legs, arms and face.
2. The areas for shoes and clothing.
3. The background heart shape

I then sprayed the back of my stencils with spray adhesive


Pinning my fabric to my drawing board I lined my stencil up with the black background stencil on the sun print. The colours I have used are sun and screen print paints with a mixture of print reducer and water mixed to the consistency of milk.

Spraying on the skin tone

Skin tone; the first spray
Lining the design up carefully I then sprayed the blue for the shoes and dress

Then I lined up the cut out heart stencil

Then sprayed the heart back ground 

This is all three spraying finished

It is now time to print the final black line screen print.

This is the finished print there are some small misses with the registration I often find this adds to the design However if you don't like it then you can add fine touch ups with your airbrush

So there it is! Just iron your print as usual to set it. You can keep your stencils to use again and again and of course they may also be used on a black screen to use on your carousel for large volume printing.

Next I am going to add full colour to a screen printed length That should be fun!