Everything you need to know about screen printing with plastisol inks, the popular screen printing
Screen printing is the most popular method of printing on T-shirts, sweatshirts, bags and many other textile products. The print is exceptionally durable, allowing very accurate reproduction of colors that are very vivid and do not lose their saturation over time. The print is made directly on the material, which allows the paint to reach deeper structures of the material, which affects the durability of the print itself.
1. Multicolor screen printing with full color vector graphics.
The print is made by forcing paint onto the substrate using a previously prepared template, called a matrix or screen. In the screen printing method , each color is printed separately and a separate matrix must be made for each color. We help our clients with Dallas t shirt screen printing. If you want any help then you can consult with us.
2. screen printing from a bitmap, printed in a raster
Due to the larger number of colors used in the project, the costs of preparation for printing increase. These costs are divided into the total number of prints made, so the larger the print run, the lower the unit cost of the print will be, and in the case of small print runs, it can sometimes be the main printing cost. Preparing the matrix involves making a printing plate and then using exposure method, as in traditional photography, transferring the pattern from the plate to a grid covered with a light-sensitive emulsion. The cost of screen printing in Dallas depends on the number of colors included in the print design, because each print color requires a separate matrix. For screen printingwe mainly use plastisol paints on clothing, giving a characteristic effect of a flexible rubber print with vivid colors and good coverage. This is a very durable method and, when used properly, does not change colors for years.Screen printing carried out in Dallas- technical requirements for projects
Both vector and bitmap graphic files can be used to perform screen printing in Dallas. However, the best format that allows you to reproduce the full colors of the design is vector graphics, sometimes called curve graphics, i.e. in Illustrator – ai formats. or Corel Draw program – cdr. With one caveat: it must be a good quality file, it is not enough to import bitmap graphics into the above programs, because it does not automatically make vector graphics.
3. Preparing a schedule for screen printing.
Vector graphics allow you to scale the graphics to the expected size without losing quality. For bitmap files, i.e. formats such as psd. Ttf. Jpg. For sufficient reproduction of graphics on clothing, it should be written on a scale of 1:1 with a resolution of at least 300 dpi.
4. Separation of colors for printing.
A common mistake here is artificially increasing the resolution of the bitmap in a graphics program. For example, if we have graphics imported from a website where the sufficient resolution is 72 dpi (resolution for display on the screen), we save it in a higher resolution, in practice, one color pixel will result in e.g. 4 pixels of the same color, which will not affect the quality of the graphics itself. . The cost of screen printing itself is closely related to the number of colors included in the design, because each color is printed separately and requires a separate matrix. The exception are prints made when printing a project separated into CMYK colors – with such separation, only 4 printing matrices are required. When using cmyk separation, however, it should be remembered that their paints and inks in the printer are separated only on a white background, which often requires a layer of white paint to be placed before such printing, which also requires an additional matrix. When calculating the cost of screen printing in Dallas we must take into account the number of colors included in the design. The number of colors is important in the printing itself, because each color is printed separately and requires a separate matrix for the printed color. The production of matrices is often called “pre-press”. Making matrices is a fixed cost necessary to print a pattern and it is a fixed cost regardless of the number of prints made. For this reason, with small quantities, the cost of such a prepress is spread over a smaller number of prints, increasing the final cost of printing. Therefore, the cost of using screen printing for small quantities is not very profitable, while for quantities exceeding 30 or 50 pieces it becomes very advantageous in terms of price and quality.
Screen printing – what is this technique?
The print is made by forcing paint onto the substrate using a previously prepared template, called a matrix or screen. In this method, each color is printed separately and a separate matrix must be created for each color.
5. Screen printing plate.
The print is made by forcing paint onto the substrate using a previously prepared template, called a matrix or screen. In this method, each color is printed separately and a separate matrix must be created for each color.
6. Mesh with hardened print pattern, enlarged.
Screen printing involves forcing paint through previously prepared printing templates. Such a template is a heavily soaked mesh on a frame, usually made of aluminum profiles. Printing meshes come in different densities and we select them depending on the details in the design and the printing ink used, and thus the print effect obtained.Before printing, the mesh is stretched with a photosensitive emulsion, onto which the pattern is then transferred from a previously prepared printing plate. The film contains the pattern that we want to transfer to the mesh, and then during the printing process, the paint is pressed directly onto the target material. To make a matrix, prior preparation of the film is necessary. Films can be made in special printing machines and chemically developed in a percentage similar to the development of negatives in classic photography. When such high accuracy is not required, e.g. of the rasters used in the projection, the film can be printed on a high-resolution printer. Either way, the next stage after graphic design is the preparation of a printing plate. Mesh lighting is the process of exposing the mesh on which the film rests, using strong light of a length allowing for quick hardening of the emulsion, where the light reaches, the emulsion is fixed, while where the light is blocked by the pattern set on the film, the emulsion remains in a form that allows it to be rinsed with plain water. After drying such a matrix, we obtain a ready-made template for printing.
7. Manual screen printing on clothing
We must remember that each color in screen printing is printed separately, so we need to create a separate matrix for each color.The screen printing process itself involves forcing paint through a previously prepared matrix. In Dallas it is performed manually or automatically. Screen printing , regardless of the paint, pattern and printing method, looks the same.
8. Automatic printing on clothing
The ink passes through the matrix in given places, through the mesh in places where it is not blocked by the emulsion. As a result, we obtain a print in one color; in the case of multiple colors, we have to apply each color separately. In the case of dark substrates, we must apply more than one layer of paint to obtain the so-called paint coverage. For this reason, prints on dark substrates are more expensive than prints on light substrates. Once we have prepared the matrices and set the matrices on the machine, it no longer matters what color we put on the matrix, in other words, we can print in red and green from the same matrix without changing the pattern. Another issue is changing the size of the pattern, but in this case we cannot change the size of the print from the same matrix, when changing the size of the print we have to make another matrix. For this reason, the size of the print is adjusted to, for example, small and large T-shirts. This is not always possible, because the print on a children’s T-shirt may look inappropriate after printing on a large men’s T-shirt, but the size of the print on size S will look good on size XXL. Screen printing, as a printing method, offers great possibilities, through the use of many paints giving various effects, it makes it possible to combine paints and other printing methods. It is definitely still the most popular method of decorating clothes, not only in Dallas.
