Rocking the Basics Part 1 - Coating and Exposing the screens

Just Watch the Videos! How Easy is that?

I haven’t covered the basics of screen printing because so many other people already have. There’s a ton of information out there that has helped us so I’m just going to link a bunch of it here! Sit down with some popcorn and watch!

Ryonet has many good videos on youtube and they sell excellent DVDs. Catspit Productions has some great videos. The only drawback (for us) is that Catspit only prints with toxic Plastisol ink. We don’t use that ink very much, only on one type of shirt, our UV reactive shirt, prefering to stick to more evironmentally friendly products. But they are a great source of DIY information. Basically, you can find most any type of beginner information on youtube.com. You can find a master list of the stuff we use here.

Prepping And Coating Screens
We don’t degrease or abraid the mesh. I know you’re supposed to, and we did at first, but then we found we didn’t need to after all. You have to find what works for you.


Putting emulsion on your screen
We mostly use one coat on each side. We also work in normal room light, fluorescent or 60 watt incandescent, but we are using dual cure emulsion. We just put our screens in a big cardboard box with a black cloth draped over it to dry and we separate them with votive candles or small jars in between the screens. But the storage closet is nice!


Another - How to Put Emulsion on Your Screen (Nice one!)


Placing Your Film On The Screen


Image Placement on the Screen and Screen Exposure
Click to Watch

How to Burn a Screen
Good information and a cute girl! We basically do things much this way but we use dual cure emulsion, expose the screen for 5 minutes and do all of this in low normal room light, but no sun light.


A couple of different ways to expose your screens


Screen Exposure Problems PART 1


Getting Your Art To Screen


Washing Out The Stencil & Reclaiming
We dab our screens dry with a paper towel and sometimes dry it further with a hair dryer, NOT held too close because nylon mesh can melt. We also use a special hose from Victory Factory instead of a pressure washer. A pressure washer is better, but you can get along with less.


 Here is a Speedball exposure chart that may help when exposing screens using light bulbs.

Next: Rocking the Basics Part 2 - Water Based and Discharge Inks

Top Tips. Some basic things we have learned.

A random list. (may be added to)

Use aluminum frame silk screens instead of wood. Wood can warp and the mesh gets loose quicker. Another tip, loose mesh is more difficult to print with.

You can have a dual cure emulsion coated silk screen (we use Ulano LX-660) out in fluorescent light or low incandescent room light for a little while, 5 to 10 minutes (or even a bit longer) with no ill effect. Avoid sunlight or UV light, however.

Make your artwork a higher resolution than you think you will need. I have often been glad that I scanned a drawing at 400 or 600, even if I thought I would only need it at 300.

You can make perfectly good custom platens out of sink cut outs from a counter or cabinet shop. They throw them away. Just order the brackets that go with your press and screw them to your home made platens. Reuse, recycle, reduce.

All of the “green” products like the Enviro line that we have tried work better than their toxic counterparts. Especially the reclaimer, Envirostrip.

Buy the best spray bottles you can find for your cleaners. The damn things will leak for no reason. Victory Factory.com sells some.

Write the screen size and mesh count on every screen as soon as you get them with a Sharpie, otherwise you may need this: Mesh Counter. Unless every screen you get is the same. Then ignore this one. We match the screen to the artwork so ours are all different.

Check a new squeegee before you use it to make sure it is straight. Warped squeegee=horror, pain and agony. Believe me on this. More details on the agony later.

A small rip in a non-image area of a screen can be fixed by placing an oval-shaped cut out piece of screen tape or blockout tape on each side of the rip and rubbing it down well.

Sometimes you can “fix” a small blockage on the exposed screen in your design by very gently poking out the hardened emulsion with a very fine needle while looking at it under a high powered magnifying glass like a linen tester. Being careful not to poke too hard and break the threads of the screen. I highly recommend a linen tester for closely examining the screens in any case.

Next: The stuff we use, a master list.

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:

Next: Top Tips