What on earth is Yupo paper?
Have you ever wanted to give screen printing a go but had no idea where to start?
First up you will need a screen! Hunt the moon do fab starter kits. Then a great place to start is by using good old A4 paper cut into a simple stencil with your new clean screen. This is easy, and can give lovely results but it is limited. If you want to change colour or do a lot of prints it is just a no go, the stencil is only fit for the bin!
Recently I was procrastinating and scrolling Instagram when the lovely @inkandbear was doing some stencil print stories using yupo paper. It was a game changer!! The paper is washable and reusable!
What! Shut the front door I hear you cry! What is this mystical magic paper?
Yupo paper is usually used for ink artwork and has a smooth synthetic surface, it is incredibly easy to cut with a craft knife so quite detailed stencils can be created. But best of all the surface makes it waterproof, meaning when you want to change colour, you simply wash it, wait for it to dry and go again! Wow!
So upon seeing this I immediately purchased some and using some floral silhouette studies of sweet peas I had been doing, created a design. Within a few moments of cutting out my stencil I realized I had f**ked up! You need to remember when doing a stencil design, it all has to be joined, you can have cut out little bits of paper floating in thin air, and guess what I had done! So I gave myself a headache trying to correct my mistake as I cut out!!
Once it was cut, I taped the paper to the face of my clean screen with brown tape (screen printers best friend) and laid it down onto the fabric I wanted to print on. I spooned on some speedball gold ready mix printing ink (bought from hand printed) and using a squeegee, pulled the ink over the screen. (weigh down the screen frame or ask a helper to hold it when you do this!) After a few rounds I washed it all down (because I could!) and experimented with a colour mixing design. I dolloped blues, pinks and purples around the screen and pulled the ink over the screen. It gave a good effect similar to sweet pea colouring.
All in all Yupo paper has changed stencil printing for good! It means stencils can be cut and kept and used over and over, yippee!!!!
