Blog TLDR; screen printing good and fun and learn it today for a challenge! but hard.
hi guys sorry idk what happened I heard a loud snap and then my body turned into dust until a strange portal opened up with a glowing sparkly orange border. All of a sudden all I could see was what I can only describe as a "Quathruphus" and a handsome voice asking me "you know it's your day right".
Ever wondered how your favorite T Shirt was printed? Perhaps on April 1st at 3:03PM EST you found yourself initiating checkout for an awesome bootleg counter strike tee from your favorite clothing brand! Whatever the case may be, knowing how graphic tees are printed can be surprisingly valuable information that can save you some money when shopping, ensuring that the clothes you are buying have a medium of print that is long-lasting.
I'm going to cover 3 main types of printing, then go in depth on my favorite (and arguably the best) method. If ur bored just skip to screen printing cuz it's coolest.
DTG (Direct to Garment)
DTF (Direct to Film)
Screenprinting (awesome and unnecessarily complicated)
Direct to Garment (DTG) printing uses a literal printer, like one that you would use to print an essay on computer paper. But instead of paper, you use a shirt(or any other garment). DTG printing is fairly cheap, but a DTG printer itself is very very expensive. Like multiple thousands of dollars at times. It processes color similar to how a normal printer would as well, allowing for millions of different colors. This is an important detail that is commonly overlooked when people are first designing logos or really anything to put on a garment. The amount of colors used in a design is in fact imperative to your ideal printing method. However, although this may seem like a best option for a printing something like a full-color photograph on a shirt, the longevity of the print is often lackluster. Given a few washes of the printed garment in a residential laundry machine, and just about a single cycle in a dryer, your print will start to crack and peel heavily. And due to the movement of the human body, and the average persons disregard for the recommended care instructions on their clothes, the print will look like dogshit in just a few weeks. Although often times this cracking is added into the design itself because sometimes it looks cool.
DTG TLDR; cheap print yay many colors = very bad quality :(
 |
| peeling print |
 |
| dtg printer |
Direct to Film (DTF) printing uses a heat transfer sheet, that also requires a special printer. However, unlike DTG printers, a DTF printer will spit out your design on a special sheet of vinyl paper, not directly on the shirt. Once you get your vinyl paper with your design on it, you plop it on top of your desired shirt and use a heat press to apply lots of heat and pressure simultaneously. (~310 degrees fair-and-height for about 15 seconds). After releasing the pressure, you peel the sheet to leave only your design, embedded into your shirt. Boom. Colors are processes similarly to a DTG print as well. But yet again, DTF printing falls short for many of the same reasons DTG does, with some added problems. Firstly, print cracking after a few washes is a common problem. Secondly, if not pressed hard enough or hot enough, parts of your design can simply fall off. For example, if you print the word "Blog" using DTF, entire letters can fall off your shirt without you even realizing it. Before long, people will be raving about your underground knowledge of the brand "Blo".
DTF TLDR; simple and intuitive, quality bad, but good for niche prints like neck tags
 |
| this DTF printer costs over $35,000! |
 |
| a man peels a heat transfer |
Now, allow me to explain screen printing.
Here we go. Also no more TLDRs
As the name suggests, screen printing uses a screen. A screen is just a mesh, like a kind of mesh that surrounds a pool in a house. This mesh was originally made of silk, which is cool. But now its normally polyester because plastic is awesome! Its stretched really really tight around a hollow aluminum frame(like a normal picture frame {I was gonna say picture a picture frame, thought that sounded silly}), normally by a machine. Or by hand using some clamps, a staple gun, and some super glue on a wooden frame. However, you should know that not all screens are created equal. Every screen has a "mesh count" which is equal to the amount of holes in the mesh per square inch.
Pretty much:
higher mesh count = more holes
more holes per square inch = more detail per print
but more holes per square inch = smaller holes = less ink per print
less holes per square inch = bigger holes = more ink per print
 |
| aluminum screen |
 |
| DIY wooden screen |
Now that you are familiar with what a screen even is, we start the first step of screen printing.
You have to clean it. Dust and grime gets in these tiny little holes which will clog your screen and cause your emulsion to not coat the screen correctly.
Now for my savvy readers; you may be thinking to yourself, what is emulsion? If you're August, you're probably thinking "Shit, I just set up my screen and forgot my thermodynamically unstable, yet kinetically stabilized colloidal dispersion of immiscible liquid droplets, maintained by amphiphilic surfactants at the liquid–liquid interface to minimize interfacial tension and prevent coalescence via DLVO-theory-governed repulsive forces!".
Essentially screenprinting emulsion is just a thick liquid that hardens when a strong UV light source makes contact with it for long enough.
After waiting 3-4 hours for your screen to be completely dry, you are ready to coat your screen with this emulsion. In a dark room, light a candle or use some special non-UV light bulbs, and pour your emulsion into a scoop-coater. A scoop-coater (scooper) helps you get an even distribution of emulsion when coating your screen. After filling your scoop-coater about 1-2cm deep, it's time to coat. Evenly disperse your emulsion in the scooper, and lets go!
Hold your screen at a 45 degree angle against the floor. Hold your emulsion-filled scoop coater very still at the bottom of your screen, and allow angle it downwards to allow gravity to push the emulsion down to make contact with your screen. Now, in one moderately swift motion, slide the scooper from the bottom to the top of the screen, making sure to keep the scooper at the same angle against your screen the whole time. Repeat this process on the other side. What? See pictures
 |
| this guy isn't even doing the 45 degree nonsense. maybe ive been doing it wrong all along. oh well! |
|
Fun fact: Every scooper has two edges: one dull and one sharp. When coating emulsion with the dull side, the emulsion is outputted more heavily. When coating with the sharp side, the emulsion is outputted thinner. Thus, the dull side could be seen as more beginner friendly since it's a little less precise and reactive to noob movements.
Now that your screen is coated, leave it to dry overnight with the flat side facing down. Be sure to not expose it to any light unless you want to do this all over again. (remember its light-sensitive)
|
12 hours passes. It's time to "burn" your design into your emulsion coated screen.
Set up a 500W halogen lamp roughly 12 inches away, parallel from your screen.
Print your design on a transparent sheet of paper, available at staples for about $0.75/print.
Lay this transparency sheet on top of the emulsion, and get ready to blast it with light. You want your transparency in the middle of your screen usually.
Turn on the lamp for the EMRET (emulsion manufacture recommended exposure time). This can range anywhere from 10 seconds to 45 minutes depending on your emulsion and the thickness of your coating.
 |
| a man has a DIY exposure setup. |
 |
| you can also just pay $700 for an exposure unit for speedy sub-10 second burns. very worthy investment for commercial level printers. |
Great, you have burned your first screen. Proceed to take it out of your exposure setup and simply spray it with some high pressure water. Your design should quickly wash out, with the emulsion staying hard. Congrats! You made a stencil and it only took 48 hours. Now wait another 3 hours for it to air dry.
 |
| a man uses a bathtub to wash out his burnt screen. I hope it doesn't stain! |
But it's important to understand why we just did this, and why did I need to print my design on a transparent sheet of paper? Well, the emulsion is light sensitive like I already mentioned. The black ink on the transparency sheet essentially blocks the light from hitting ONLY those parts of the screen, which allows you to easily wash out the emulsion after you burn all around it. Boom stencil.
Amazing! You are now ready to print. Im tired of writing details im so hungry. cover your screen in ink, put your shirt under the screen, and push the ink thru in one swift motion. make sure your screen is NO FARTHER than the height of a quarter (1/16th inch) above your shirt. (see off-contact distance in figure below)
please follow this VERY simple graphic to explain the printing process.
 |
| flooding screen with ink |
 |
| pressing ink thru screen |
After each print, you need to dry/cure your ink with a flash dryer or heat press to ensure that it reaches the optimal temperature to minimize risk of cracking after washing or drying. Use the POWBMRCS (Plastisol or Water Based Manufacturing Recommended Curing Specifications) for this step. Plastisol ink is plastic based, and will never dry until you cure it. This is convenient because you can walk away from a print job for a week and continue a week later without washing out the screen. But it's bad because usually plastisol ink has a very shiny and rubbery texture to it, sometimes mimicking a DTF print. Water based ink is petroleum based. Just kidding it's water based, obviously. Based on what? Water based ink is good because the ink truly sits inside the fibers of the shirt without creating a super rubbery or shiny print. But either way, screen prints will age beautifully when the ink is dried/cured correctly, with the ink cracking slowly and developing character based on how the wearer of the garment moves their body everyday.
 |
| flash dryer for drying/curing ink |
A moment.
GREAT JOB!!!!! You have screen printed a one-color design. Repeat all steps for each individual color of your design.
No comments:
Post a Comment