Screen Printing

Screen printing, also called serigraphy or silkscreen printing, is a printmaking technique in which ink is forced with a squeegee through a fine mesh screen onto a surface below, while a stencil blocks the mesh wherever ink should not pass, so that only the open areas of the screen transfer the image. Each color in a design needs its own screen and its own pass in careful registration with the others, so a multicolor print is built up one flat layer of color at a time. Its ability to lay down an even, opaque, saturated field of color on paper, fabric or many other surfaces has made it widely used both as a fine-art printmaking method and as a commercial process for posters, textiles and packaging. The artist Andy Warhol is widely credited with popularising screen printing as a fine-art technique in the 1960s, most famously in his 1962 Marilyn Diptych, a portrait of Marilyn Monroe printed in bold repeated colors; Roy Lichtenstein and other Pop Art painters likewise adopted the process for canvas work in the same decade.