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A screen is not bought. It is made — one for every colour in your print, in our studio, before a single metre is pulled.
Where a print begins
Most printers can only work from a file they are handed. We can start from a pencil line. A sketch on paper, a photographed detail, a remembered pattern — the studio takes it from artwork through separation to a finished screen, by hand.
That is what origination means here. It is the reason a Dragonfly print belongs to the brand that commissioned it, and to no one else.
01.
The drawingIt starts with a pencil line — drawn by hand, at print scale.
02
The screenSeparated colour by colour, exposed and washed out.
03.
The pullOne screen, one colour, one pass down the table.
04.
The finished piecePrinted, cured and made up — here as a curtain.
The origination process
01
A motif arrives as a drawing, a photograph, a scrap of cloth — or as nothing more than a conversation. Where there is no artwork, we draw it. Prints from our archive, some dating to the 1980s, are redrawn by hand in current colourways.
One screen carries one colour. The artwork is separated by hand so that every pass knows exactly what it is holding.
Each separation is output as a film positive at full print scale, checked against the repeat before it goes near a screen.
The mesh is coated with photosensitive emulsion, left to dry in the dark, then exposed to UV light through the positive.
The unhardened emulsion washes away. What is left is the screen: open where ink should pass, closed where it should not.
Maggie mixing a colourway on the table.
Colour
Every colourway is mixed on the table and matched to Pantone formulas by the studio’s colourists, then recorded so the same shade can be pulled again next season. Strike-offs are posted for sign-off before the run begins.
Made by hand in Nairobi · Est. 2006
