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Silk Screening 101
Check this Tshirt Silk Screening demonstration by swands. The screened design was applied to a variety of shirts to test color mixes before we put the shirt up for sale. This is the process, it's a very D.I.Y. way of working, and a very limited way of printing shirts. It's as if each and every shirt is a unique piece of art. So follow along, and make your own shirt using this method. Photos taken by C. Wands.
Step One: Get all your materials together. Shirts, screens, inks, rollers/squeeges, pallets, tape, whatever you want to use and feel comfortable using. Also pick an area were you can work freely, and close to a sink would be ideal. 
Step Two: Tape your shirt(s) down to a flat surface, try to place a sturdy piece of cardboard inside the shirt and wrapping the loose ends on the opposite side of where you plan on screening the design, then tape the ends down firmly so there are no wrinkles on the screen side. 
Step Three: I prefer using a small paint roller as opposed to the "squegee" method. It gives you greater flexibility and the ability to control the use and flow of the ink, especially since with these shirts I'm going for a stressed, crackled coating, not a solid coat throughout. Plus they are cheap, and smaller, and accessible. 
Step Four: Get your ink ready! The rollers I use come with a mini ink tray, I also enjoy using a paper pallet (wax paper). 
Step Five: Roll on the ink, don't go too heavy, the beauty of a roller is that you can keep rolling, over and over, be gentle and patient. 
Step Six: Assuming you've placed the screen where you want the design to be, start laying down the ink, soft at first and repeat till the desired amount and intensity of ink and color are where you want them to be. 
Step Seven: Now that you've put the desired amount of ink into the design, carefully remove the screen. Let it dry for however long the ink your using tells you too in a cool dry place, just to be safe, let it sit for 24 hours. 
Step Eight: Get that screen to a sink, I like to use windex or whatever else is similar that happens to be lying around. Don't let the ink sit too long otherwise it will dry up inside the screen and it will become a useless piece of rubbish, of course if you're doing multiple shirts it can wait a bit, but more than 20 minutes without a washing and things get mighty gunky. 
Step Nine: One of the finished designs, a brassy color on black. 
Step Ten: Another finished design, black on a deep red.
We hope you enjoyed this demo, check out When They All Fell at http://www.myspace.com/whentheyallfell
If you're interested in picking up one of these shirts for yourself visit our estore. |
