Speedball Art Products Diazo Photo Emulsion Kit for Screen Printing Frames

Amazing! Gives enough you can make a bunch of screens over and over, it's incredibly easy to use but may take some practice.

This emulsion kit has a small bottle of sensitizer which you add to the emulsion to make it light-sensitive. That sensitizer should be a gel (in fact the bottle warns you it will feel empty), and you add water to the gel. I've used the same kit before and it worked perfectly well.Unfortunately this arrived and the gel had dried into a powder. I tried everything I could to rehydrate/reconstitute it, and it just didn't work. I mixed as much as I could, but it never incorporated and the emulsion never worked correctly. You could see the tiny flakes of sensitizer and the emulsion didn't turn the correct color when mixed. This can happen in person, too; I bought this kit off Amazon because the week before I bought it at a craft store, and the one I took off the shelf was also dry and unusable.If you order this, immediately check the little sensitizer bottle when it arrives. If it's a bone-dry lump, don't bother mixing it. I generally like Speedball products just fine, but this specific emulsion kit has a lot of problems if aged.

worked for me!

I power mixed the emulsion with a drill and got a lot of air bubbles - IDIOT.Next I had some trouble spreading the emulsion, but, that was due to my test screen not having near enough tension, and, it was just my first try. After my little mess with the test screen, I coated my production screen, A professionally built and screened aluminum frame.That came out pretty good. You need to be able to fully spread the emulsion and then screed off any excess quickly. I made a nice clear plastic spreading tray but ended up using a 3" plastic bondo spreader with a sharp point to finish spreading and then screeding off excess emulsion. I am making smaller screens though.Spread front of screen, then screed, spread back, then screed. Inspect your screen, spread more, then screed off excess from front side and back side. Press the screed into the screen pretty hard, if you are getting a proper thin coat, you wont get any lines from making multi spreading and screeding passes.I will tell you this, watching youtube videos with pros spreading emulsion with a single front and back pass is pure fantasy. You are probably NOT going to be able to do this with one perfect spreading pass in front and one perfect spreading/screeding pass in back, so don't even worry about it. Be ready to do multiple passes front and back, but be ready to get it done quickly.This process works 100 times better if you got a professionally done and screened frame with the screen stretched super tight. I stretched my first frame myself and found it tough to get high enough screen tension, then I bought a cheap but good aluminum frame with pre-streatched screen and OMG, it was so much more easy and better.Spread and screed off your emulsion quickly, as if you take too long the emulsion starts to thicken up and then it gets very hard to screed off the excess. Thankfully, I found this out on my first test screen so I got right to it and finished quickly on my money screen and it came out PERFECT. Nice even thin coating and when it fully dried it was exactly as needed, no more thickness then the screen itself, and, that is exactly what you want. If you get excess thickness on your coated screen you will have problems with excess paint loading when doing your screen printing.Excess thickness was the problem I had with my first screen, not made with emulsion, but with a sheet of sticky vinyl with letters cut out. It worked OK, but was hard to get a nice prefect thin layer of ink/paint on my products as the vinyl, seemed thin enough but in reality, it was thicker then it should have been and when the screen thickness was added, it was laying down to thick a layer of screen printing ink [paint].I'm so looking forward to using my screens made with this emulsion, screen printing should work so much better.~

The first thing you want to do is check that nothing has broken, spilled, or dried. The emulsion with be thick like glue and blue in color. The remover will be thin and clear like medical alcohol or bleach. Both should have cardboard gasketed lids and foil caps on them. The sensatizer (tiny bottle) should be either dry and at the bottom, or thick and at the bottom. If any of the sensatizer is spilled out of the little bottle (along the threads or down the side) send the kit back for a new one immediately. The product is good if you get it undamaged, but Speedball uses incompetant monkey powered robots made from scrap pulled from the Robot Wars set to package everything so check your stuff.As for operation, when the sensatizer is added to the emulsion it turns a good medium (not quite emerald) green and will turn back to blue after it cooks out when you burn the stencil. Look for a light-medium blue hue and the uncooked parts under the negative image should have a yellow, jaundace like hue to them. When cleaning out the emmulsion make sure to wipe up messes immediately as the emulsion leaves yellow stains on nearly every surface known to man, including porcelin and the steel rim around my sink. Trial and error for new users will happen, just don't leave emulsion in a screen for a long period of time if you don't want a permenant stencil, and clean the screen completely before letting it dry if you don't want a permenant stencil (yes the emulsion remover may make the emulsion impossible to remove. Don't ask me how, I failed mad science 101).