A Layer of Ink You Can Actually Feel

This is the big one. Get up close to a proper screen print. Go on, touch it (gently!). You'll feel it. The ink sits proudly on top of the paper, a distinct, raised layer with a texture and a physical presence. It has a beautiful, flat, velvety finish that drinks in the light. This is because screen printing is a stencil method. We’re literally pushing a thick, viscous ink through a mesh screen with a squeegee. It's a physical transfer of a substance.

Now think about a standard digital or Giclée print. That process involves a machine spraying thousands of microscopic dots of watery ink that soak into the paper fibres. It's a high-tech photograph, essentially. It can look sharp from a distance, but it has no soul, no body. A screen print has weight. It has substance. It’s an object, not just a picture.

The Human Element in Every Colour

You can't just click a colour swatch on a screen. Every single colour in my prints is mixed by hand, by eye, in a pot. It’s pure alchemy. You’re tweaking formulas, adding a bit of this, a dash of that, trying to get the opacity or transparency just right. Want a searingly bright neon pink? You need a specific fluorescent pigment for that. A shimmering gold? That’s an ink loaded with metallic particles. This isn't something a digital printer can replicate; it just tries to trick your eye with dots of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.

This manual process means the colours in an Oli Fowler Art print are uniquely vibrant and punchy. They're solid, opaque, and exactly the colour I intended them to be, because I mixed them myself. There's no algorithm involved, just a well-trained eye and a lot of messy pots.

It’s All in the Registration (and the Imperfections)

Most of my work involves multiple colours, which means multiple screens—one for each colour layer. The real craft comes in lining these layers up perfectly, a process called registration. You're printing one colour, letting it dry, then lining up the next screen with pinpoint accuracy to print the next. It’s a nerve-wracking business.

And here’s the secret: it’s never perfectly perfect. Across an edition, there will be minuscule, fractional shifts. A tiny overlap here, a sliver of a gap there. This isn’t a flaw. This is the proof in the pudding. It's the ghost in the machine, the evidence that a human being, not a robot, made this object. These tiny variations give each print in an edition its own unique fingerprint and character. It’s what separates a handcrafted piece from a sterile, mass-produced digital file.

So when you see one of my prints, you're not just seeing the final image. You're seeing the history of its creation. You're seeing the thick layer of hand-mixed yellow, followed by the careful placement of the blue that sits on top of it. It’s a tangible, layered piece of art that tells the story of how it was made. It’s the furthest thing from just pressing 'Print'.

If you fancy seeing the difference for yourself, why not have a browse? You can almost feel the texture through the screen. Almost.

Head over to the olifowler.com store and check out the prints.