Researchers: Ava Harper and Maggie Sullivan, 2024
We were interested in using the wheat starch based recipe from “Creating a Plant Based Screen Printing Ink” (researched by Rachel Rinker and Jorie Morgan in 2022 and Liz Chalfin, Tony(a) Lemos and Dominique Pecce 2023) to test the viability of natural pigment powders for screen printing. Using all natural pigments from Natural Earth Paint with the wheat starch-based ink will allow us to have a screen printing ink that does not contain acrylics, and thus can be washed straight down the drain, with no need for acrylic flocculation. Our research included tests of the effectiveness of the pigment to create strong color, lightfastness of the ink once printed, and longevity of the ink in storage once cooked.