Screen Printing On Your Apparel
At Colortex Screen printing & Embroidery we use the process of screen printing in order to decorate your apparel or your clients apparel.Screen printing process
The process of screen printing accounts for the majority of the individual apparel pieces we produce in our facility in Ottawa. Before you can start seeing the actual design screen printing on apparel, there are multiple steps that need to happen before being ready to print the apparel. Screen printing is the process of using a aluminum screen with varying mesh counts, to support a image positive of the soon to be screen printed artwork.. The image positive forms open areas of mesh that transfer ink onto the screen printed materials. The ink is placed inside of that screen and mesh which is then pressed through the mesh as a sharp-edged image onto a substrate. A screen printing squeegee, not your window cleaning ones, is manually or automatically moved across the screen mesh while applying pressure in order to push the screen printing ink into the mesh openings for transfer by capillary action during the squeegee stroke.
The Screen Printing Equipment
At Colortex screen printing & Embroidery, our screen printing department is equipped with 2 automatic screen printing presses, one manual press and a large energy efficient dryer in order to cure all of our screen printed apparel.
Capabilities in Screen Printing
We have the capabilities to print over 40,000 shirts weekly so we can most certainly handle large-size orders. Not to say that we don't work on small orders, but our minimum is 24 units.
Our High Quality Printing
Due to our high quality screen printing equipment, we are capable of having turnaround times that are highly beneficial for your clients or in order to get your new apparel collections or replenish your sold out collections.
Ink Types for Screen Printing Projects
Being that screen printing is an art form, no ink can be perfect for every fabric style and screen print designs. For that reason, we work with 3 different ink styles in order to create our screen prints. These are the 3 most common types of inks we work with but are constantly testing new things.
Plastisol
Plastisol screen printing ink is considered to be a solid in such that the ink does not dry and needs to be cured in order for it to dry. Due to this property, all of the ink stays on the fabric when laid on top of the fabric. This makes for a high opacity underbase screen print which allows to print bright and bold colours
Water-Based
Water-based inks are a type of ink that rely on solvents that evaporate to hold the pigments. The most common solvent is water. What this means is that the water base inks are not as thick as Plastisol ink. Due to the evaporation properties, the inks absorb into the fabric instead of laying on top of the fabric. Water based inks require a high level of knowledge and have its limitations with fabric compositions.
Discharge
Discharge ink is most often combined with water based inks or used as an underbase for plastisol. This ink actually does not leave any colour on the garment, what it does is takes the dye out of the fabric. Discharge inks are really useful for dark coloured garments in order to remove the dye. The limitations of discharge inks is that it only works efficiently on 100% cotton and not with all dye colours.
Know your Screen Printing Methods & Techniques!
When thinking about screen printing, the first thing that comes to mind is that it is the process of printing a design on apparel but there's much more than simply printing ink on a shirt in order to make the designs come to life. The printing methods and techniques that can be used in order to make the final product exceed customer expectations vary substantially and no method works all the time.
Foil
You are looking for your design to have a sleek shine to them or a portion of your design needs to stand out from the rest. Foil is a two step process where it combines a screen printed base layer of specialty adhesive ink for the foil to adhere to the base layer and then the foil gets applied to the base layer and peeled off after it has been pressed onto the base layer.
Puff and raised
This is where you tell the story of your medical team and service for visitors to know who you are, why you do this and what value you wish to deliver to your customers (presented in bullet points). Let’s make it as impressive and professional as possible
Simulated Process
In order to achieve the most photo realistic prints possible, screen printing using the simulated process is achieved by applying a similar technique as CMYK. This process is achieved by colour blending spot colours and halftones. By overlapping the colours it creates new colours.
Tone on Tone
This is one of our favourite techniques for a variety of designs as it is one of the most subtle ways of screen printing on a garment. This technique is achieved by screen printing a colour of the same colour as the garment or slightly different. This screen print makes for the artwork to be visible to the eye but very lightly all depending what tone is used to print on the apparel.
4 Colour Process
Four colour process also known as CMYK has been one of the oldest methods to reproduce colours with screen printing but is not so common anymore due to the arrival of simulated processes. This technique is best known and used on white or light coloured garments by using cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink in order to create colours by blending them together.