The Weight of the Pigment: Why Screen Prints Have Texture
This is the most immediate difference. Pick up a digital print—it’s usually flat, smooth, and the ink sits like a thin, shiny film right on the surface of the paper. That’s because digital printers, whether inkjet or laser, use highly diluted, fine-spray inks.
Screen printing, conversely, is about *deposition*. We use thick, heavily pigmented pastes. Think of it less like spraying and more like squeezing paint through a stencil, which is essentially what the mesh screen is.
When I pull that squeegee across the screen, I am forcing a substantial layer of ink through the fine mesh directly onto the paper. This isn't measured in microns; it’s a visible, tactile layer. This is why a screen print has that beautiful, slightly raised texture, depth, and saturation that digital printing simply cannot replicate. The colour isn't just a representation; it is a physical layer of paint.
The Dark Art of Registration: Separating the Colors
Digital printing is a magic trick performed by a microchip. It takes millions of colours and reproduces them all in one pass using four base colours: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (CMYK). You press print, and the machine figures out the rest.
Screen printing is the absolute opposite. Every single colour in the final artwork must be manually separated and printed individually. If a design has four colours—say, red, yellow, blue, and black—I need four separate screens. This is where the real skill, patience, and occasional mild screaming come in.
The screens must then be perfectly aligned, or ‘registered.’ I print the yellow, let it cure, then swap the screen for the blue one, lining it up precisely over the yellow pass, sometimes to within a fraction of a millimetre. If the registration is off, the colours overlap incorrectly, and the whole print is ruined. It’s a manual tightrope walk repeated dozens of times per limited edition. This is the labour you are paying for—not automation, but precise, manual control.
Editioning: Where the Printer Becomes the Artist
When you buy a screen print, you are buying an 'original print,' not a copy of an original painting. That distinction is fundamental to fine art.
Because the process is so physical and manual—from coating the screen with emulsion to washing out the stencil, and finally pulling the squeegee—no two prints will ever be exactly identical. There will be marginal differences in ink density or the bleed of the colour, which is not a fault, but proof of the hand-made nature.
This is why all genuine screen prints are part of a numbered, limited edition (e.g., 20/50) and signed by the artist. When you see a piece of Oli Fowler Art, you know it was created batch-by-batch, manually checked, signed, and approved. It means that once the edition sells out, that specific piece is gone forever. This scarcity and high level of quality control elevate the screen print far beyond the realm of cheap posters and into collectible fine art.
Screen printing is tactile. It requires physical strength, technical chemistry knowledge, and the patience of a saint when that registration is fighting you. The time and material investment required to pull just 50 perfect prints is enormous, but it's essential to the quality.
When you hold a piece of work created this way, you are holding the final, tangible result of hours of physical labour and material devotion. That’s why it feels, looks, and lasts longer than anything spit out by a machine.
Want to see the results of this messy, wonderful process for yourself? Browse the latest signed and numbered editions in the store. Every piece is hand-pulled, London-made, and ready for your wall.