H. Yuen water colors, stenciled and silkscreened prints

What is the difference between a stenciled print, a silkscreened print, an original watercolor, and a photo reproduction?

Pochoir is another term for fine-art stencil printing. I use an x-acto knife to cut out designs in clear acetate and this type of brush to apply the watercolor pigments. This particular stencil is for the baseball cap worn by one of the women in "Chatting before dinner". You can see the watercolor residue around the edge of cutout shape

All of my my stenciled prints are made on smooth paper. Under 2.5X magnification, stenciled prints appear to be composed of many random sized dots which gives a stenciled print very interesting textures. The texture is created by the bristles of the brush. A stenciled print may also have fine color gradations with soft edges like under the brim of the hat and below the eyes. This detail is from the woman with the straw hat in "Chatting before dinner"

Serigraph is another term for a silkscreened print where a squeegee is used to force ink through a fabric. The fabric has areas of open mesh where ink can go through and areas of filled mesh where it cannot. Even though color gradations are possible, the colors in a silkscreened print tend to be uniform, show little or no texture, and hard edges between colors. This 2.5X detail is of the same woman in a silkscreened version of "Chatting before dinner" named "Meet the friends".

An original watercolor means this IS the real painting. In this 2.5X detail from "Blond with blue hat", you can see the texture of the watercolor paper which tends to be rough and all kinds of color gradation. The colors blend smoothly from one to another with soft edges.

In this 2.5X detail from reproduction of the watercolor "Beach with life guard" on the cover of N magazine, you can barely see the evenly spaced dots of color. Without any magnification, this high resolution reproduction looks just like the original artwork.

This page was updated on July 26, 1999