Hannah Bourne, known to friends and family as Bournie, is a screen printer with a diverse portfolio of work. Before founding Bournie Prints, she studied at London College of Printing and graduated from Chelsea College of Art & Design with a BA (Hons) in Interior & Spatial Design.

Having lived and worked in various parts of London and abroad, she settled in Barnes with her husband and their three grown-up children and has been here for nearly 25 years. Bournie works from her studio at home.

What inspires you?
My screenprints usually start life as a photograph I’ve taken. I take many, many photographs on my travels but in particular in London, where I was born and grew up. I find it a constant source of inspiration.

Things that catch my eye often amuse me; a quirkily named cafe; a public loo door lock that’s telling me to ‘engage’; signage painted in reverse, on dimpled glass reads wryly, ‘slrig&syob’; hundreds of snails clinging to a ‘cedez le passage’ signpost.

Describe your process
The end result is essentially the ancient tradition of silkscreen printing onto beautifully heavy, high-quality papers – a satisfying manual process of pushing ink through stencils, one colour on top of another, until the image is complete. But the process to get to that point is a mix of modern technologies.

The initial photograph that inspires the image is taken on a digital camera. I take it into Photoshop to clean up the image, removing extraneous details, cropping or enhancing tonal contrasts. This is also where I simplify and distil the image down to just a relative few colour separations, maybe seven or eight, sometimes more, but occasionally as few as three. This tool is so helpful when finding just the right colour balance and overall palette of the piece.

Each colour layer becomes a black ‘positive’ on acetate that I expose using photo emulsion onto a series of screens. I am now ready to squeegee each colour, working from light to dark, through the screen’s mesh that is now its own negative – slowly the image emerges on the paper, layer by layer. It’s a lengthy and quite technical process and very hard to describe in writing, but I love all the stages, not least of all the ridiculous amount of time I spend mixing the inks to match the colours and opacity I’ve decided on. That balance is all important to the final result.

What are you working on now?
Aside from my own work I am sometimes commissioned to do bespoke projects too. I’m just finishing off an interesting one, a little different from the usual requests of people’s children or family pets.

This time it’s a screenprint on a wooden panel instead of paper, a composed collage of photographs taken of children’s graffiti that they scrawled onto their garden shed walls when they were little. All grown up now and the shed no longer in existence, this piece will be a lovely memory of happy, feral times when the kids were still small and making such funny and loving scrawlings. I’m particularly looking forward to presenting this one to the client, I know it brings a smile to my face every time I look at it.

What does being a Barnes Artist mean to you?
I really enjoy the camaraderie of being a member of this group of lovely humans. Everyone is very inspiring, enthusiastic and encouraging. Even though we are all very individual in our selves and in our approach to our work, we come together as a collective.

Sometimes we have group trips to dappled sunlit woodlands, feasting on home-made, wild garlic soup, warmed on a campfire or then we have a fascinating talk given by an eminent artist upstairs at the Bull’s Head or life drawing classes at a fellow artist’s house. And of course the all important Barnes Artists exhibitions that spur us on to create something new, to get us out of our comfort zones if responding to a particular brief for a show. It’s really helping us all grow as artists, which is essential.