The lightbox is almost ready to go, just waiting for the acrylic now. I’ve already got up early this morning to coat a small screen to use as a test exposure piece because I need to know how long to expose it for. At the moment with two 60 watt task lights I expose a screen for 30 minutes. This lightbox is made with three 60 watt bulbs and because the light is more concentrated and the screen will be weighted down I’m guessing that it’ll take less time to get a good exposure.
These are the pictures from Sunday’s day of DIY! Below is the box all finished, I stuck the foil down this morning and as you can see the pugs are having a good nosy at our handiwork to see whether it lives up to their standards!
Have you exposed screens with the sun? Is it faster with a lightbox? How can you tell when the screen is done exposing?
I started off exposing with 2 lamps but now I use a lightbox because it’s more efficient. The length of time your expose a screen for depends on how strong the light source is, it’s a bit of trial and error at first, check out this handy guide:
http://blog.craftzine.com/archive/2007/07/craft_101_silkscreening.html