Creative Rehab:
How Screen Printing has inspired my work
Sometimes your creativity needs a boost. You keep moving things around on a page, hoping some magic will appear. That was me, too much time staring at screens, too many undo buttons. Then I found screen printing. And re-ignited my passion for illustration and design.
Illustration - Work in Progress!
The power of imperfection
Digital design can be neat, clean, endlessly adjustable. Screen printing doesn’t work like that. It’s messy, unpredictable and wonderfully human.
My first attempt bled and smudged (looked like a misprint in a newspaper) but it looked great to me either way. Embracing the imperfection, became the point. The accidents give the work its edge. It felt like a reset for the part of my brain that had forgotten how to play.
A community of makers
I discovered this on the wonderful screenprinting t-shrts course at The Printhaus. A space buzzing with other people experimenting, sharing tape, swapping colours and exploring freely. It felt like being part of a real community: not a Slack channel, not a Zoom call, but humans.
That sense of being surrounded by makers and work (even if all of them were not there at the same time) changes how you see your own work. You start to think differently: about weight, texture, colours, layers and process.
Art as therapy
Screen printing is more than a craft: It’s therapy. Not the soft-focus, meditative kind, but the type where you come away with ink on your hands and fresh energy in your head. It’s also a mindful escape from the everyday. The rhythm of pulling ink, the focus on each layer, the surprise of the final reveal it pulls you into the moment, away from distractions.
I went looking for a distraction and found something else entirely: creative rehab.