Screen Printing 101
We all love amazing t-shirts that show off unique designs of our favorite fandoms. It should be known however, that there is quite a process that a design goes through before it arrives at your front door, ready for your enjoyment as a tee.
Art appearing on apparel are thanks to a process known as screen printing. It is a versatile technology that allows production en-masse of a design.
There are 4 basic components:
- A woven screen mesh that supports an ink-blocking stencil. This is a negative created out of an impermeable photo emulsion substance that is “burned” onto screen using light.
- Specialized ink that works with the fabric that is applied and dried to a durable quality.
- A squeegee (or mechanized equivalent) that runs across the screen to push the ink through, sometimes known as a pull.
- The final product to be printed on, whether it be a shirt, garment, or other type of canvas.
The Artwork
Each piece of art has its own unique beginnings– whether it started as a humble napkin sketch or was drawn natively in a graphics program, the submitted file needs to be digital. Many artists use a combination of analog and digital techniques to create the submission-ready result.
While artwork on a shirt can appear to have many textures and colors, each design is actually composed of an arrangement of dots, similar to pixels on a screen. For screen prints, the screen is a physical one made of a mesh through which the ink is pushed through known as halftones. This can create the illusion of many ink colors when only a few were actually used.
One color is printed at a time, so several screens need to be made depending on the needs of the design. Each layer also needs to be cured with heat before the next is applied.
For artists preparing a design for screen printing, the halftoned image should be 55 LPI (lines per inch). Here is a video tutorial on the process.
Although the initial submission does not need to be screen print ready (requiring only a preview image of 640 x 800px), if selected as a Daily Tee, the image will need to run through a color separation process, and must be at a resolution of 300dpi (dots per inch).
Another aspect to note, in applying ink onto an absorbent substrate like fabric, certain screen pulls can create what is known as dot gain. This is when dots of ink that are close together spread around the halftones and make the image appear darker than intended (for dark ink on a light shirt), usually around 10-15%. This can also be dependent on the pressure of the squeegee applied.
Sizing
At TeeFury we strive to accommodate fans of all shapes and sizes. To that end, the size of the design is in consideration when offering Mens, Womens, and Youth options.
Designs that live in the Gallery that are DTG printed may have the design size slightly adjusted to fit Womens and Youth sizes. To view a detailed Fit Guide, click here.
Inks
Most of our tees are printed using plastisol inks which affords many favorable qualities like good opacity on dark garments and retaining details of the artwork. The texture of the finished design can be made softer or heavier using special additives or adding multiple layers of ink, respectively. Sometimes other types of inks will be utilized. These include water-based inks that penetrate the fabric more than plastisol and create a softer feel. It is ideal for printing darker inks onto lighter color shirts.
Speciality of Inks
On occasion, when a particular design calls for it, we’ll apply unique inks with features like Glow, Metallic, and others. Each has unique properties that accentuates the theme or concept of the design.
These inks are only available for the Daily Design and the special inks not apply for Gallery designs which are DTG printed. See more on the differences by checking out this guide here.