CALL ME OLD SCHOOL — printing special effects basics still are the same. I’ve been in the industry for more than 46 years now. We call it garment decorating now, but when I started it was just plain screen printing.
First, a retrospective and a few personal experiences about my trials with printing with these favorites. I have many memories about the past things we did to get the presses rolling. I remember one incident where we burned one of the screens for a 6-color job crooked by accident. To be able to use the screen, we cut off and trimmed one of the corners of the old wooden frames to fit it into the Precision oval presses. Unfortunately, this happened more than I would like to admit.
I remember using real film that you had to create using a large 20-foot horizontal camera and using real chemical baths to develop the film. Or scraping the bottom of all but the first screen to remove the pasty buildup on the bottom of the screens after every 200 to 300 prints. This was the norm before inks were developed that did not build up.
Flat prints without texture also were most popular back then. Glitter or glow-in-the-dark inks were about as special as it got.
Then around 1985, I was using a water-based puff product that was new to the market, or at least new to me. It was called J&S Puff Stuff and it was the first time I had seen anything dimensional for screen printing. Being that it was water-based and not plastisol, it took some time to figure out how to maintain the screens. The water-based ink was destroying them. Mind you, we were using old school diazo emulsion, but the screens needed to be chemically hardened to withstand the aggressive water-based inks and volume printing.
Then, a momentous screen-printing event happened in 1986. I remembered this vividly because that’s when I first laid eyes on a flash unit. This changed the screen-printing world tremendously. No longer did we have to rely solely on the opacity of each individual color to achieve a bright design on black shirts. This single “innovation” changed everything. Now you didn’t have to load up your ink colors with white opaque pigments to create opacity but that also muted the vibrancy. You could have purer colors that miraculously created less buildup. It meant that 4-color process printing on black garments became a reality.
It affected everything from art to separations to screen mesh selections to having to deal with one less color and having a better white. I know there are going to be some who remember the timing differently, but this is how I remember it.
An important innovation occurred around 1988 when I saw what we now call high density ink. It was a print that came from somewhere in Asia and we were trying to reproduce it for our largest customer. It was a raised image with sharper edges that was unlike anything we had seen. It wasn’t puff; it was thick and sharp. There was even some “body” to it.
We tried to duplicate it, but we just couldn’t figure it out. We blamed it on table printing, which can print a single color as many times as you want to achieve the thickness. Here, we didn’t have that luxury. You only had one or possibly two strokes to try and get the same height. To be honest, we really didn’t know how they did it back then; whereas now, it’s just like printing regular ink — something that’s familiar with slight modifications.
I remember working with Murakami on thick emulsion at the time. There was a learning curve. Thick emulsion in the sheet form had been around for a long time, generally for use in the circuit board industry. I’m not talking about the thin, indirect emulsion in the 20-40 micron range. I mean in the 200-400+ micron range. Once these thick films were introduced into the textile screen-printing world, specialty printing exploded.
AdvertisementWhen I talk to screen printers, many have dabbled in some specialty ink printing such as using puff, glitters, shimmers, and glow-in-the dark. Yet, they shy away from HD and gel gloss inks. Often, they feel that their shop is not skilled enough to handle such prints, or that it takes too much time and effort to create the screens.
I’ll walk you through the steps. If you master these, printing with any ink will be a breeze. If you’ve read my previous articles, I’ll sound like a broken record: Film, Mesh, Emulsion, Squeegee, Cure. These are the tools of the trade. Yet, these also can determine how well your prints come out regardless of whether they are flat or embellished.
Once you have mastery over the individual tools of screen printing, you’re ready to have some fun. Don’t get me wrong, translating an image to a print is not always straightforward when it involves multiple screens and colors. Just because it looks great on the computer screen and the PMS colors called out by the separator look good doesn’t mean it will translate the same way to the shirt.
My team and I printed multiple test samples with variations of colors to arrive at our final display prints. Fortunately, we do have the luxury of access to various specialty inks and colors. But the ground rules apply. We used all our knowledge and tricks to create the best prints. So don’t be afraid to try different squeegees, inks, colors, special effects, or mixing an HD clear or gel gloss with a shimmer or color, for example.
Do try out special effects inks you’ve never tried before. Try flock, or caviar beads. Foils, glitters, shimmers, reflective, spongy type inks, and so many more.
I liken screen printing to a race car, where all the components must work at their best — independently and in unison. Hundreds of items must be at their best to be competitive. And you’ll end up with the best prints your shop can offer.
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AdvertisementKieth Stevens is the Western regional sales manager for International Coatings. He has been screen printing for more than 42 years and teaching screen printing for more than 12 years, is a regular contributor to International Coatings’ blogs, and won SGIA’s 2014 Golden Image Award. He can be reached at kstevens@iccink.com.
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