Silkscreen print

A silkscreen print, also called a screenprint or serigraph, is made by forcing ink through a fine mesh onto paper or cloth, with a stencil blocking the areas that should stay clear. Each colour needs its own screen, so a print is built up in flat layers of ink, one pass at a time.

Definition

Screen printing is a printing technique in which a mesh transfers ink onto a surface, except where a blocking stencil makes the mesh impermeable. A blade or squeegee is drawn across the screen to fill the open mesh with ink, and a reverse stroke presses the screen briefly against the surface, so that the ink is pulled out of the mesh as the screen springs back. The name silkscreen comes from the silk once used for the mesh; today the most common mesh is polyester.

Origin

Screen printing reached Western Europe from Asia in the late eighteenth century. Early in the 1910s, printers began using light-hardened chemical stencils, which made the process practical for commercial work. In the 1930s, a group of American artists coined the word serigraphy to separate artistic screen printing from industrial use, and Andy Warhol is credited with popularising it as an art technique; his Marilyn Diptych of 1962 is a screenprint in bold colours. It suits flat, strong colour, which is why, in our reading, so many illustrators and poster artists, Rockin'Jelly Bean among them, choose it.

The word itself carries the history. Serigraphy joins the Latin for silk with the Greek for writing or drawing. Robert Rauschenberg began silkscreening in 1962 after visiting Warhol's studio and seeing the paintings he was making with the process, and the technique has stayed in artists' hands ever since, alongside its commercial life on garments, signs and circuit boards.

Key facts

How to identify it

These are the signs we look for in our own handling.

• Flat colour. Each colour is a solid, even layer. Under a loupe there is no dot pattern within a colour area.
• Raised ink. The ink sits on the surface and can be felt at the edges of shapes, especially where layers overlap.
• Registration. Slight overlaps or gaps where colours meet are normal, and show the separate passes.
• Against offset. Offset lithographs, such as most commercial posters, are printed from plates in fine dots of cyan, magenta, yellow and black. A loupe shows the dots.
• Against giclée. Giclée and other inkjet prints are made by a printer spraying fine droplets; colour areas look soft-edged under magnification, and the ink does not stand proud of the paper.

A silkscreen is not automatically an artwork by the named artist: many reproductions are screenprinted. The technique tells you how a print was made; the edition, the signature and the paperwork tell you who made it.

Where it appears in the collection

The house holds many numbered silkscreens. A Rockin'Jelly Bean Rock'n'Roll Circus silkscreen, first print, 55 of 100, shows the technique at poster scale, and an Apollo's Song silkscreen after Osamu Tezuka, edition of 60, shows a small edition. The artist's prints are read in our guide to Rockin'Jelly Bean and Erostika; edition practice in Japan in our guide to Murakami, Kusama and Nara prints; and care for paper in our guide to framing and conserving prints. Living Japanese artists sit on our Japanese artists shelf.

Related entries

• Edition number and artist's proof: reading the number.
• After-work: when a print is not by the artist.
• Edition context is the product: why the edition matters.
• The Rockin' Jelly Bean and Erostika collection: numbered silkscreen editions.

Sources

1. Screen printing, encyclopaedia entry, for the technique and terminology. wikipedia.org
2. Tate, "Edition", art term. tate.org.uk

Last reviewed 14 November 2026. The Japonista Curation and Concierge Team, Tokyo, Japan.