The 411 on T-Shirt Printing

So you've got everything ready: the textiles, the t-shirt designs, the orders - what now?

The first thing to do to get your design onto actual t-shirts involves printing films with the variety of colors that you will use. Graphic artists will take a look at your designs and figure out which printing method is best for your choice of colors.

There are two primary methods of printing colors: the four-color process and spot color printing. The four-color process blends four colors together onto the textile to give a wider choice of colors. Also known as CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black), this process is used, in order to get work to look like actual photography or to have textural effects and highly sophisticated shading.

Spot colors are printed separately as individual colors. Hundreds of colors are pre-mixed and a wide range of numbers can be mixed as needed. Sometimes, a simulated process is used, which is a hybrid form of printing, which combines components of both the four-color process and spot color printing.

Graphic artists then produce transparent acetate films of individual colors, printing them in black with its identifying information and registration marks. These films are saved into an envelope with instructions on how to print and are then burned into screens.

The colors of your t-shirt designs will be exposed onto a fine mesh silkscreen of a high-intensity light box, which is coated with photosensitive emulsion. This, in turn, will harden it and it will become insoluble to water. The acetate film comes with black sections that will prevent light from penetrating into the emulsion directly underneath. The sections that are safe from exposure will dissolve in water. The silkscreen is put in a high-pressure washing unit. Here, the emulsion sections that are not exposed will be washed out of the silkscreen, leaving the intricate stencils of the various colors needed.

While this entire process is going on with the art department, the t-shirts will be ordered from the wholesalers. This can be quite a difficult task, as sometimes, calls are made across the nation for the particular sizes and colors of t-shirts. Once the textiles arrive, they are counted and checked against the order to ensure that everything is as it should be. Then, they will be taken to the screen printers.

Multiple-head presses can hold four to sixteen screens that are usually arranged in a radius and rotated over the palettes that will load the t-shirts. Presses come in either manual or automatic. Manual presses are physically rotated by printers, while automatic presses are rotated by pneumatics. With both presses, the printer will flawlessly adjust the printed images from the screens until they are properly aligned to create the final image. Correct colors are then added to each individual screen and are pushed through the openings of the screen through the help of a squeegee from the bottom to the top. Various things contribute to the final silkscreen print result, such as the hardness of the squeegee, the force and angle of the pull used, as well as the type of ink used.

Once the printing is done, the t-shirts will be run through a high-temperature dryer, which will cure the ink and bind it to each fiber of the material. The graphic artist will approve the final test print and they will then be printed.