By Jacob Cass / Recently I have been posting about sweet t-shirt designs (here & here) so I thought this would be a good time to share this guest article. Blake will guide us through some tips for preparing artwork for T-Shirt printing.
As many of you probably already know, doing graphic design, and doing graphic design specifically for t-shirt printing can be two totally different beasts. Have you ever worked extremely hard for long hours on a t-shirt design for yourself or a client, only to have the printer tell you that your design won’t work for t-shirt printing?
Screen printing is one of the early methods of printing. It involves the passing of ink or any other printing medium through a mesh or ‘screen’ that has been stretched on a frame, and to which a stencil has been applied. The stencil openings determine the image that will thus be imprinted.
History Of Screen Printing
Screen printing was a technique first used by the Chinese almost 2000 years ago. They used human hair stretched across a wooden frame to form the screen.
A screen printer is a company or individual that uses a process called silk screening to place text or artwork onto fabric, such as T-shirts, hats or a variety of materials ranging from cloth and plastic to steel. The silk screen is the image you want transferred, such as baseball team logos on 20 shirts, for example. With silk screening, the various ink colors required for the image are pressed through the screen directly onto the shirts. Follow these tips when choosing a screen printer for a particular project: