Dharma’s Discharge Paste Color Remover or Our Chemical Romance

The Holden’s Discharge ink we had used on the Saints of Pain t-shirts (covered in my last installment) was great, we loved it (for the moment, that is) and yet the ink wasn’t exactly like the shirts that had inspired me. The Saints shirts were much, much better than shirts printed with Plastisol ink, which I dislike, but I needed to learn more.

I had also found this stuff, “Discharge Paste” and the description said “Discharge Paste does not always remove all of the color, it depends on the dye and the color to which it is applied.” That intrigued me. Sounded like potential trouble, but intriguing trouble. It doesn’t work like the discharge ink which removes the color from the shirt and replaces it with another color. The discharge paste just removes the color the shirt fabric was dyed with, taking the design back to something like the raw color of the fabric before dyeing. Though it doesn’t work on all dyes or all colors.

Decent quality shirts like Hanes, Anvil, Jerzees, Bella, etc. work the best. Most of the colors will discharge well, but we’ve had trouble with a few colors like Royal Blue, not all the blues, just Royal. Shirts that are the “Pigment Dyed” type don’t seem to discharge very well, though sometimes you can use that as an effect. Another cool effect is to use discharge on a 50/50 cotton/poly blend. Only the cotton fibers discharge, giving the design a kind of distressed or slightly speckled look. At the end I’ve put some pictures of shirts we’ve done with discharge paste.

Using the paste is easy. Here’s what the Dharma web site says “It is fairly safe to use, the main byproduct being ammonia. It is for natural fibers and unlike bleach, it doesn't damage them.” It doesn’t have to be mixed, you use it right out of the container. Doesn’t even need to be thinned with water. It has an odd consistency, sort of gloopy, to use the technical term. Freddy says it’s like snot. It’s water based, so you do need to back flood while you are screening to keep the paste from drying in the screen. Back flooding is when you lightly pull (or push) the squeegee across the screen to lay down a layer of ink that sits on top of the design to both lay ink down on the design for the next print stroke and also to keep a water based ink from drying in the screen.

The gloopy paste:

Here’s a picture of a back flood stroke.

You screen the paste onto a shirt, let it dry and then iron it with a steam iron. An iron that puts out a lot of steam is best. I’ve tried 3 or 4 different irons, but the one we always use is an old iron my dad gave me when I left home. It’s beat up, but still works the best, as long as we clean it regularly. We fill it with water, put it on the cotton setting and iron the design and it appears like magic. It is a bit smelly and it does leave an odor on the shirt until it’s washed. We usually air the shirts out before we deliver them or ship them.

Here's what the shirt looks like when screened. You can barely see the design.

Here is what it looks like as you iron it. Magic!

Here's a closeup of the print. Three years later it still looks great:

Here are some different shirts we’ve screened with the Discharge Paste. Each one comes out a little different, depending on how you screen it and the color of the shirt. To get the varying degrees of distressing we vary the squeegee pressure slightly. The same screen was used for all of these. We love the unpredictable results and the naturally distressed effect. By far the most popular ones are the more distressed shirts. More examples of what we do can be found on the Deaths Head Designs web site.

Two red 100% cotton shirts, but different brands:

Bella Women's 50/50 Heather Jersey shirts:

A navy blue and a black shirt, both 100% cotton:

A grey Gildan Ultra and an Anvil black spaghetti strap, both 100% cotton:

A cardinal red Gildan Ultra and a burnt orange Hanes Beefy T:

Also, here is a very informative video by Catspit Productions that explains different methods of pull or push strokes and flood strokes. This video is demonstrating with Plastisol ink, however, which is a bit different than the water based inks we use.

More of these videos are on Catspit on youtube:

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Inspiration in the form of a shirt

So I had this tee shirt. It was made by a company called Lip Service. I was very familiar with the company and had been enjoying their clothes for many years. They tended to be stylish, but not the most comfortable. But this one was different. It was my favorite t-shirt... ever. It was everything no other t-shirt in my experience was. It was soft and light weight and seemed to have no ink on it at all, but it had a cool picture. I used to wear it and wonder...

This is a close up of the print on the Lip Service shirt:

Then I bought this hoodie. Hmm. More mystery! A closeup of the print on the back of the hoodie:

You can see from these photos that the print is very different than the plastic ink that coats a t-shirt and sits on top of the fabric. I've never liked the feel of that plastic ink (plastisol). What the heck was this miracle of style and comfort? Of course, it was all just aimless curiosity until Freddy and I began discussing a silk screen business. At that point I had to KNOW. Because that’s what I wanted to do. Make people’s favorite shirts.

Well, you know, everything can be found on the internet (you found this blog didn’t you?) but it isn’t always easy. It was a long, circuitous route to the information I sought. And even then, I didn’t know for sure until I tried screen printing with the inks I had found. I found these two first:

Holden’s Discharge Inks from Standard Screen in NYC
Dharma’s Discharge Paste Color Remover

We tried the Holdens Discharge Ink from Standard Screen (in Red) first, on some black shirts for a band we are friends with. We had the screen made for us at Standard from a computer file I sent them. Working in Freddy’s basement. we screened up a batch of shirts and discharged them with a heat gun.

The way discharge ink works is this: You pour out as much ink as you think you will need into a mixing container, we use a plastic cup. You weigh it with a digital scale and mix in 10% (by weight) of the activator powder. Once you mix the discharge ink, it's only good for a few hours. They say up to 8 hours, but we notice a drop off in quality after 4. You silk screen the ink onto the shirts and before it dries, you heat it to about 300-350 degrees with a heat source that blows hot air (we used a heat gun to begin with though now we have a forced air flash dryer). You can see the print change color as the ink discharges the dye in the shirt. It gets brighter. Once you have discharged the print, the shirt is done and the ink is dry, though it has an unpleasant smell until you wash it or air it out.

The ink is water based so you can thin it with water if it gets too thick, you can use propylene glycol to slow down the drying time and you have to be careful not to let the ink dry in the screen, which means working quickly and being sure to back flood your screen with a good coating of ink. (More about back flooding in my next post.)

Here's Freddy preparing to print the red discharge ink we got. I had carefully mixed it with the activator:

JayJay discharging the shirts with a heat gun:

And we wore them to the show that night! And delivered our first screen printing job! Even if the shirts were a little smelly from the ink.

Off to a great start!

And here's a closeup I just took of one of those shirts after 3 years of wearing and washing:


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