Blog - 43 ArtWork

Making a Squeegee for Print Screen – The Blade

8 Comments / Silkscreen, Printing / D Almeida

The squeegee is the other part of the basic screen printing equipment. In a manual and artisanal context, the frame and squeegee can be considered as the screen printing machine – the former supporting the image matrix to be printed and the latter operating actively and directly on the former, in order to reproduce that image by pressure exerted on the ink and through the mesh. The squeegee is a piece consisting of a part, usually made of wood or aluminum – the handle – and a part made of rubber or synthetic plastic – the blade -, with the purpose of distributing and pressing the ink during…

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11 Open Source And Freeware Apps for Office Production

4 Comments / Software, Office / D Almeida

Open-source office production applications offer a powerful, cost-effective, and transparent alternative to proprietary software suites like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. Built on a foundation of community collaboration and open standards, tools such as LibreOffice, ONLYOFFICE, and Collabora provide comprehensive word processing, spreadsheet analysis, and presentation design without the burden of recurring subscription fees. These applications prioritize user sovereignty and data privacy, allowing individuals and organizations to host their own documents and maintain full control over their digital infrastructure. Furthermore, because they utilize universal file formats like the OpenDocument Format (ODF) and maintain high compatibility with OOXML, they ensure long-term document accessibility…

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Silkscreen – About The Stencil

Leave a Comment / Silkscreen, Printing / D Almeida

A stencil is the equivalent of a mold for an image, as a way to reproduce it identically without having to draw or paint it endlessly – a principle also common to a printing system. In this case, the image becomes the matrix. In the context of screen printing, this stencil refers to the screen itself, right after the entire process of waterproofing the mesh along with the opening of the matrix, and which, by the nature of its constitution, is defined as a permeographic stencil. Generally, there are three ways of producing a silkscreen permeographic stencil, between indirect and direct methods: 1.by collage – cutout (indirect)…

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Silkscreen Preprinting- The Positive

Leave a Comment / Silkscreen, Printing / D Almeida

The photosensitization stencil process requires an independent matrix, usually produced on transparent film – a so-called photolith, if generated photomechanically; or a slide/film positive, if generated manually or digitally. Currently, the term photolith is still used in some professional environments (Western Europe), derived from what was the lithographic photomechanical and which expanded to other printing techniques. A photomechanical process means that the mechanical phase (printing) depends on a photographic phase, which implies a light-capturing process. Before the computer age, a photolith was effectively generated by photographing and developing an original on a sensitized surface (a complex compound of insulating layers, sensitized with silver chloride), in a darkroom.

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