Printed some shirts, almost peed my pants

[kyoru]

I screen print shirts a lot but hot damn check out how clean this came out...



Lines are like 2 mm thick at most, nice and smooth as well. What do you guys think of the print quality?

[Old Lace]

Wow, that's really good! Is it difficult to do?

[matt2000]

They do look very good. Do you do them by hand then?

[normansan]

Possibly THE coolest shirt I've ever seen. I want one.

[Paco]

I'm really interested to see what method you used to get that fine of detail with a screen print. And that design looks awesome, did you draw that by hand or obtain it elsewhere?

Any chance of throwing together a DIY with materials list and lots of piccies

[Werner]

that really does look good

[kyoru]

I don't do the screen printing myself, I would like to get into it but my skill in screen printing is non existent and I want a high quality print out so it will have to wait. The drawing is done in Adobe Illustrator.

[Spazatao]

Originally Posted by normansan

Possibly THE coolest shirt I've ever seen. I want one.

I second that!


And, excuse my ignorance, what exactly does 'screen print' mean? Thanks.

[NecroJoe]

It'll start falling apart like the 10pt font on my George Carlin "2000 Dirty Words" shirt...cool nonetheless. Very VERY cool!

[kyoru]

Originally Posted by Spazatao

I second that!


And, excuse my ignorance, what exactly does 'screen print' mean? Thanks.

Basically transferring ink through a screen that has a mask on it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_printing

[Spazatao]

^I see. Is it too difficult to DIY?

[calvin950]

Amazing! They look really good, start selling em =p! When i do DIY projects it always end up in a massive FAIL!

[SirSmash]

Originally Posted by Spazatao

^I see. Is it too difficult to DIY?

Making the screen can be, if your doing it yourself you probably are making it by hand. It really depends on the detail of the image. If you have the screen already then no it's not very hard... you pretty much put the screen on whatever you want, like a T-Shirt, and then ink goes on top to fill in the holes and thus produce an image. You also normally wouldn't make a screen for one shirt, you'd do it this way if your making a few hundred.

I think if your making your own shirts you might be best off either 1) just using those iron on things, if the shirt is white or black and you don't use too much heat they come out pretty well. 2) you can build your own t-shirt printer out of an old inkjet but you'll have a hard time getting a really sharp image or 3) just send what you want to a place like vistaprint, cafepress, whatever... I just ordered a few shirts from vistaprint that came out pretty well and they were only 5 bucks each with their weekend half off sale. They seem to use a type of inkjet printer to make the shirts.

What I've also tried in the past and surprisingly it works decently well if you only have one color. Just have a custom stamp made with whatever you want on the shirt and then simply stamp it on. But this again would be best if your doing more than one shirt due to the cost of producing the stamp.

[alexmanners]

I actually did a screen-printing project at my school for an Art project. There were 2 options we had to do the screen:
1) Print out image on a Overhead sheet (see through paper), then apply the the paste to the silk screen (forget what you use). After you have done this, put the over head onto the silk screen then apply a strong light source to it do that the image gets burned into the Silk screen. Then you use a squigy and press your shit.
2) You have to trace the image onto a silk screen using pencil then paint all the areas around the image with sealant (forget what it is again), then you squigy print.

It's not terribly difficult, just very time consuming. Look on youtube they have a ton of tutorials on how to go about doing it.

[The Fishman]

Originally Posted by Spazatao

^I see. Is it too difficult to DIY?

It is not that hard, just need to source the right parts for the exposure unit and well as the screens themselves. It is tedious though.

You can build the screen printer yourself and the exposure unit if you know a little about woodwork.

If you have a bit of money you can purchase these and the supplies of ebay as I have done. It will cost you a 2 or 3 grand to do it properly or a couple of hundred if you are just a hobby person.

[NAIDANAC A]

Dude can I pay you to make me one of those shirts?

Like seriously that is amazing.

[kyoru]

Originally Posted by NAIDANAC A

Dude can I pay you to make me one of those shirts?

Like seriously that is amazing.

they are already made, and for sale on my web page. as for the DIY question, sure it's easy to do, but to make a really good screen print you gotta have good equipment and experience. something like the shirt I had printed would be pretty difficult to diy.