How to start screen printing your own t-shirts.

1. Introduction: Hey, it's Chessie from Squeegee & Ink. And in this course we're going to show you how to screen print t-shirts for your own brand. In this course, I'm going to show you all the steps needed to screen print this three coloured design onto a t-shirt. Additionally, I'll show you how to add personalised branding to your t-shirts and to create custom packaging that will make your t-shirt brand stand out. In this course, we will cover garment choices, artwork sizing and preparation, screen coating and exposing, registering multi-colour designs, ink options, screen printing t-shirts, printing inside neck labels, screen cleanup. And lastly, branding and packaging. When taking this course, you have full access to our 'Screen Registration Template' and our 'Printable Area Template', both of which will be fully demonstrated in this course. 2. Garment choices: Things to look for when you're picking a garment for your T-Shirt Printing. Things like whether the share is organic cotton. This just means that it's probably a higher-quality shed and it's going to be nice and smooth to print on, which will make your print appear smoother and crisper when you come to print it. Another consideration is that it has sightings. So on some of the shirts they're actually tubular. They didn't have a sightseeing. And that means that when you wash them, they can twist and be a little bit deformed on the person. So a side seam on a share is a really good indication that it's a high-quality shirts. Another thing to consider is we would like these types of things. So small the hillside labels. And if you notice they're kind of offset from the center. That means that when we're doing our branding on the neck, we don't have to include the size every single time. That just means that you're actually setting up less screens when it comes to printing, because you can print the same Lego and all the shirts and people can still reference the size label. Just another thing is that your shirt includes wash care instructions. So in some countries that's a legal requirement when you're reselling the fats. And it's just a very nice thing to have already included in there. And it's also probably tear away if you're going for these types of shirts, It's just something to consider. Another thing is that you can get good stock of these. You don't want to find your best shot and then run out of stock. So these kind of shots are held in large quantities and wholesalers around the country. So we pretty much never going to run out of a piece. Hopefully. And other considerations are that the unbranded to start off with is very discreet, low size label. So we can go ahead and decorate that fully and make it look like and branded shut. The shared the weekend to be printing on for this course is the Creator shot by Stanley and stellar. So there's a few reasons why we've, we've gone for this choice. So we've gone for the off-white color because we didn't want a very bleach shirt color. Because we feel like that's going to work really well with our particular artwork. We also love the ICA credentials of studying stellar. This is an organic cotton and it's also like VGG and accredited and it can't get any more green in our opinion. So we love that thing is very easily brand a ball with the size label that I talked about before. It's very nice and smooth surface, so it's going to hold up and make it look really vibrant and freshly printed. So that's some of the considerations that we make for our own brand. And I hope that that can guide you to making good choices too. 3. Artwork sizing and preparation: When your screen printing your shirts, the most important thing is probably the image size and the print location on the ship. So I've created a template here and it's called the principle area. And they are dimensions that we've worked out that are gonna be great guides for you to do your designs against. This is the principle area template, and I've opened it up within Illustrator just to show you around a little bit clearer, we've actually used the unisex create a t-shirt as the base for our t-shirts and this template. And then we've used the cruiser, which is one of the Stanley stellar police as the example for the hoodie side. So we're just printing a t-shirt today. So I'm going to show you what we've done. We basically went and measured all the dimensions of the creator shirt from top to bottom, across the chest and what the arm length was. And this is based on the smallest size, small of the creator shirts. From there we distinguished what the principle area would be for our largest Print Area in us, in our setup. In order to get the biggest print area for the front chest, the Internet variable, and the sleeves. We've also done that for their back print as well. That's just based on a couple of considerations in the studio, like how big are flattened sizes on our prayers. As long as we make sure our images fit within these red boundary boxes, we should be good to go when it comes to printing them in real life. As a quick estimation of how large I want my particular design to be on the shirts. I will just quickly paste in my image. And I'll just bring it over here towards the back of this t-shirt. If I zoom in, I can see that if the image is 35 centimeters wide by 50 centimeters tall, that's going to take up a large proportion of that shirt, especially when it's wrapped around somebody's body. I want it to be large, but I don't want it to be an enormous or oversized. So I'm thinking I'm going to go for around the 30 centimeter mark. And just looking at the proportions of my image, it's not gonna be too, too tall either, and it should still fit within that boundary box, which I estimate it to be around the 40 centimeters tall. So there the rough estimations of how large I'm going to make my image from my shirt. Now we know what size the image is going to be on our shirts. We can start figuring out what the film positives are going to look like. So we need to have film positives printed onto acetate sheet that register line up with each other. These are gonna be used to expose our screens. And i'm I'm just going to walk you through how to add the registration marks and separate the layers onto their own film positives. I'm going to open up my platinum template from within Illustrator so that I can edit it. So if I find it, which is in my downloads, I'm going to say File Open. It's my platinum template there. Let me just quickly talk you through what you're going to see on the registration. When we can see our layers, I've distinguished a few different things here. The first one is the artwork layer. This is where you're going to place your artwork and it also contains some registration marks. And the most important part of this, this template is this box here. So this is the pattern size. So we can't print anything that's particularly on that button size on a particular carousel. With distinguish that our pattern, which is the board that you print the t-shirts on, is 16 by 22 inches. So we don't want to go right up to the edges of that. So I figured out sizing and we want to stay within that constraint. Let's talk about these other layers. We've got the small screen. If I bring that up, just toggle this on and off. The small screen is like quite a common screen that we use. So we're going to use these screens for small chest locations. For example, I've mocked up that outside screen dimensions 20 by 24 inches. So that means that it can, can print in an area around this location. So we can go right up to the edges if we're using a small screen because it's not quite tall enough. So that's just something to bear in mind. By toggle that one off again. And I put on the large screen. So the last screen, when I turn that one on, you can see it's much larger than the button size. So that's gonna be great for printing a large back piece, for example, because I can use a lot more of that Play button and it'll be really comfortable printing that concise. Then if I toggle on the placements layer, this is just a guide, but it's just quite handy. Just so you can determine some standard sizes for things like left chest, front, chest, and back print sizes. And it also gives you an estimation of where to locate those images on the screen. So you'd want a left chest to be in this area just so that you can reach that. Left chest location when you come sprinting inertia. And again, you want the background in the middle so that when you have it on the shirt, you're not printing out the edges or anything like that. You're printing in the easiest location on the screen. I can turn this up quickly so I can find my artwork now, I'm going to make sure I'm on the artwork layer so that I can place onto that layer. And I say File Place. We're going to find it on the desktop as this KUR work right here so I can place it in. I need to also make sure that it's embedded. So once it's already highlighted here, I'm just going to press embed. And it's a few artworks together. So it might even have this bounding box. So I can get rid of that by just highlighting this little box, deleting that. And that just makes sure that I can manipulate these images on their own. So if I grab my back design, I'm just going to make sure that it's the right dimensions. If I just go off the top of it, I'm going to just double-check here on the width that is 300 millimeters, which is perfect. That's going to hit on my flattened and on my shirt and easily fill my layer. And it's not too tall either. So keeping the same proportions, it's only four centimeters tall. So that's all very doable. I'm going to bring up my design. And I think what I'm gonna do is I want to be able to locate these registration marks on the platens though. I'm just going to track them down a little bit. So I've got room to make a nice big print. Contract these up. So now I'm ready to drag in my artwork and I can start separating it. I'm ready to start separating this design. So I'm going to make sure I'm grabbing all of the registration marks and the design. And I'm just going to bring it to the left-hand side. I know that I've got three different colors in my design. The t-shirts actually going to show up in this area. So I don't need to think about that. I can just make three copies right next to each other. So I'm just going to copy and paste modulus. And this is just a super quick method, but I'm going to label which color I want on each of the layers as well. So this is going to be a black screen experience being the yellow kind of color. This is going to be red. With my design I've already kind of needs into up. So I've made sure that all the layers are just busting up next to each other and there is an overlapping. I also figured out that every time you see any red color, that that's the same read throughout all the image. So we're not getting lots of different variations on those colors. Quick method for separating these would be to lock some of the layers and delete out anything that isn't relevant. For this layer. I'm going to lock the black. Again, select with the direct selection tool an area with black. I'm going to say select same, fill, color and stroke. And then I can go come on to Object. Lock. Selection shows you that it's command to. The more I can do is just highlight anywhere on this image. And it should just select the other two layers and leave out the locked ones. Selected it. I can press Delete and it's deleted. The other two layers, me. Why can then do is say Object, Unlock All. I can select this back again. I don't want to select anything on the page because it might manipulate the other images that I've already got on this, on the whole artwork. So I'm just going to do that again. I'm going to say pick a little bit of the black, say select same, fill, color and stroke. And I'm going to make sure that it's all the way black, one of the zeros. And that's going to print a nice thick dark rich going past me. Press Okay, and that layer is complete. I can go to the yellow and then again, I'm going to lock this down, delete all the irrelevant layers and colors. So I can just go into my direct selection tool and select area of yellow. Come up on this swatch when it's definitely the right color. And I can say select same, fill color and stroke and say come on to or go to Object. Lock Selection. Again, I can highlight all the way around here, making sure I don't pick up any registration marks on the way around. And I can delete that. I can say objects unlawful. I can take another bit of yellow. Then I can make sure that it's pure black. Again. I can go into the red one. I can select some red, select same ******* chicken. And I can look at Drucker whom the other columns to meet them. I'm just going through that is quite a lengthy process, but once you go through it, then you're really, then you really know that you've got an isolated each of the colors and separates them out. So I want to actually build in a little bit of overlapping of my colors when I come to print them. If I unlock everything which is on my design, I would like a little bit of stroke, which is an outline which is going to fill up sits underneath the other layers on my yellow and on my bed. So if I actually go into this layer, make sure there aren't any little messy bits. So if I select that, you can see there's an extra bit of design that I don't want it to be that stuff. I just go in and delete that, make sure it's not interrupting me. I can select this area and I can add a stroke. So I'm going to add a one-point, strengthened my point. And I can double-check that the black and the stroke is all the way into the zeros are just dragging this down into the color right into the corner. So that one has a stroke on it. I might even just write that on here just so I know. I remember yellow and then I'll say one PT stroke. And then I could do the same for the red. Just highlight it and make sure there aren't any weird extra bits that are being highlighted. I don't think there are. I can add my one-point stroke on that bit. Double-check It's the perfect black which isn't zeros. And that one is also good to go. It's good to reference and right, if you've added strokes on just because it might manipulate the layer order. So what I'm gonna do is print the red than the yellow. And then the black layer is going to go over the top of them. And it's going to block out any of this stroke whites, but I've added onto those, so it's just something that's good to know. These layers are now ready to be printed onto my phone positives. I've printed my phone positives onto inkjet film using my epsilon inkjet printer. And a RIP software. Rip software means that my printer lays down lots of thick black ink on top of each other. And this one is really nice and dense and this is how your film positive should be. So what they're going to do is block out the UV light from reaching your emotion, which is light sensitive. Then we're gonna be able to rinse out any uncovered emotion. And that's gonna give us our stencil for our printing. If this isn't something you can do it in house. Rstudio's which printout film posters for you and send them to you so you can express your own screen. If you are asking somebody else to print your positive for you, please make sure that your first row, making sure that your image and your artwork is pure black. It's in the CMYK color mode on your computer that they're using inkjet film and an inkjet printer to create your dense film posters. 4. Screen preparation: The next step is to coat your screens. We've already determined the screen size. Say this is a 23 by 31 inch screen, and that's the outside screens I mentioned before already figured out the image fits in nicely there. And I've gone for a 43 t mesh, which in America is a 110. This is perfect for screen printing plus assault. And like nice bulky graphics on to our set. So this is a perfect match choice for us. The next thing to consider is the mesh is nice and clean. So what we do with all of our screens before we code them is we use degreaser on them. So you decrease you as a kind of soap, but it's basically going to get rid of any grime and dust and grease on this screen surface. And going to allow our emotion to a deer nicely to the surface of the mesh. So I spray this on and then I PowerShell off. And then I let my screen dry in a nice still dust free room, and then it's ready for me to cope. Another key piece of kit is your scoop coater. This is going to hold your emulsion and this gallery to apply a thin layer of motion to each side of your screen. So some considerations for these. We just like this one because it's got this extended edges which kind of collect any excess emulsion on the edges. You also need to make sure that your scoop coater can very easily run all the way along the inside of your screen and on the back and cover as much of the screen is possible. But you don't want your scoop coater and knocking into the edges. So this particular one fits into my screen perfectly. That's the one we're going to choose for creating our screens. The next thing to consider is your emulsion. In our studio, we permit lots of different types of ink and we also coat screens for lots of different people. So we need a really high-quality one. This is a joker d'Azur emotion. This is the choice that we are going to be using today. And it's gonna give us really nice, clean, sharp lines and it's going to be resistant to R plus so link. Make sure you've also got a clean rack handy just for any low drips and things like that. And also we use these all the time and they're just silicon spatulas from the kitchen department online. And that is for getting all of the excess emotion out of the scoop coater and making sure you don't have drips on your emulsion top. You might have noticed that I'm standing outside my dark room. So when I've got my screens coated, I want them to dry in a dark space that's light and UV isn't exposing them prematurely before I come to express them myself. So I like to keep that nice and dark and clean and dust free. And it does have lights on in there. However, they have UV blockers on them to prevent them from leaking UV light onto my screens when they're just drawing. Let's go into the dark criminal, Chez how we create our screens. When you start cutting your screen, you want to coat the flat side fast. Say this is the flat side is exposed to me now. And I also have it propped up against the wall and again, some batons on a rubber mat. That just means there's quiet study and it's still going to slip when I started coating my screen. We need to now fell scoop coater, output some emotion. So I'm going to take the lid off. I'm going to pour it in. I want to go for maybe just over a 0.5 from my scoop coater. So that definitely got enough to create a nice even coat on my screens. I can just take off any excess drips. And the labor content learning. And we're going to use the sharper side of the scoop coater to k1 screens. I can just let that level out and let any air bubbles pop. Before I've kept my screen, I'm ready to cook my screen. I'm going to use that sharp edge, like I just said. And I've got a quite filled up with the motion that not so much that when I tip it over, it's going to pour up the edge. I've got this screen propped up against that. So I can just start by holding the edge against the match so it's in contact with it. And then I'm making sure that my motion is level and migrating trough. I'm going to tip the Kaiser probably about 45 degrees. Or really it's just when the emotion starts to make contact with the actual mesh. When it's made contact with the mesh all the way across, I can now slowly push the character on the screen. And then when I get to the top, I can just let the emulsion pull back into the trough. I can push against the mesh slightly and then I can lift straight back and hopefully there'll be no drips. Now I'm ready to 10 screen over encode the other side. I can do exactly the same on the other side. And I'm going to hold it up against the mesh. But I think that's been no real quick applicants. There's a bit of lip to get over. So I've got a level quickly put it in, wave the emulsion to hit all the way across. And I can slowly bring up again overreact. And when it gets to the top, I can just pull the tip, the coats it back on itself says level. And then I can push into the mesh slightly and then straight back on myself and hopefully they'll be no drips again. We're looking for is a nice shiny even. And if you've missed anything, you can potentially go over it again and you can scrape off any drips with silicone spatula. But really you're trying to go for just one code on each side. It's important to try your screens with the flat side down, facing down. I'm going to put it in my drawing maps. This is going to be left overnight in a dark, dust free environment. And this will allow the motion to fold the undecided the screen and it will be nice and level. And when I come in and wanting to express this is going to be dry and experts really nice and crisp. After getting my screen, I can put all the excess back in the tub. And the silicone spatula really helps get into all the crevices and gets all of my motion back in men than in seconds. I'm going to wash this up in the sink with just some water. Get a drawing and it will be ready for my next coating. Once your screens are a 100 percent dry. So for example, if they'd been driving all night, then they're ready to be exposed. So I'm going to lay them on my explosion in. My exposure unit has a metal halide bulb and a vacuum blanket. There's lots of different options for exposure and units. For example, there's overlying involves, which will also make EV and exposure emulsion. Just an important thing to note is that your registration marks on the same distance away from the edge of the screen on oath, all of your layers. So it's quite handy to have a set of screens. They're all the same size. So I'm going to measure this a little bit more accurately and then it would be times put my vacuum on and expose my screens. I measured to the registration marks from the edge of the screen for all three screens. And the old exactly the same. So I'm ready to go my exposure, your exposure times are going to be different to mine because you will have a completely different setup. You have different emotions and maybe even different mesh types. When you're ready to wash out your screen, you want to lightly rents it on this side, and then you rinse the other side as well. Leave for about 30 seconds and then you're able to fully wash out your screen. I can even leave that to soak for about 23 seconds and then all the emulsion should just fall off. If you're noticing that your emotion is very slimy, it's probably that it hasn't had enough UV to, to actually care properly. And if you're not being able to wash out your image, it's most likely that your film positives aren't dense enough. At this point, you want to just quickly inspect your screen and make sure that all the emulsion is washed out from the, from the image areas, especially on the registration marks which can sometimes be missed. And then this is just ready to dry. 5. Registering multi-colour designs: Today we're going to be using the M and L Creusa. This is six color for station carousel. So some things to look at with this particular machine of a scope for Pat pellets but move. So these are the platens where you put your shirts. And then it can hold six screens, which means it can hold up to six layers and six colors. You're going to find there's lots of choice on the market for picking your machine. And it might be a case of just starting out with a cinco cinco station press to get you going. We can now go ahead and start registering our screens. The most, the easiest way that I can explain this is by putting your film positives onto your flatten. And then you can just make sure the registration marks centered on to your pattern. And then we can basically mascot down all the way around, so it's nice and secure in place. We're also making sure that Platon is tightened, so it's not moving when we align office green to the film positive. At this point, I can take my first layer and I'm going to pop it in one of the arms and Stop lining up to the registration marks. Where you're looking for is the registration marks in your screen that being exposed. They want to line up with the registration marks that are on your film positive. So it might take a little bit of time, but it's definitely worth putting the time in. Now, you'll find that the emulsion is a little bit transparent to help you line those up. So I'm going to start making little micro adjustments on my screen and then tightening as I get very close to that screen being registered to the film. Once you're happy with all for registration marks, make sure everything is tight or love your press. And if you left your screen up and put it back down again, you can make sure that it's going to be hitting in the same place again, and that your registration is good for that first screen. We're now going to repeat that step for the next two layers of this design. Registering to the same piece of film positive on the button. The next thing today is to make sure that your snap, which is the distance between the Latin and the underside of the screen, is even all the way across. You're looking for about a pound coins height. And you won't this screen to snap back from the flatten in the same kind of distance all the way around. So you kind of want it like hovering over there quite evenly all across the screen. So my dress, I have to adjust the snap with just the logo. Just hit. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that and make sure it's level on all three screens. And my patterns. Go to the new lesson on this one because I must be doing some canvas bucks. As you've made some adjustments. If you've changed the snap at o, you do need to go back and make sure that your screens that Olmsted and register with the film positive. And then the next thing today is to make sure that the Platon is an exactly the same place, is the same distance out from the press. So if this measurement on my pressed, and that will make sure that you're printing the shirts and exactly the same location on each of your nature of your shots when you're going around. 6. Ink options: When it comes to screen printing T-Shirts, there are three main categories of ink, water-based plus desal and discharging. Water-based things for screen printing, t-shirts and textiles can be a really good option for beginners because they are cheap to get into. You don't need much equipment. So you might just need to heat press. And when you're printing, you may just need a hair dryer in order to partly driver layers. As you can see, they're nice and vibrant. They will show sink into the fabric so they're nice and soft to touch. So there's a lot of advantages to water-based. Disadvantage might be that they dry in the screen's a little bit quickly. So you do need to be quick and prepared when you're printing, because that could just be something that gets in the way of printing and consistent print run. One other disadvantage to using water-based thinks might be that the queuing times were quite long. So ideally you'd have a really long conveyor dryer with four-step drying the ink. However, most studios answer up like that. So you'd probably more likely be using a heat press, which means that your heat pressing every single shot for about 45 seconds to a minute. So it's okay for small runs, but if you get into the hundreds, that's going to take up a lot of your time. Plus the solving is really widely used in the industry by lots of different professionals. This is because it's quick to use. It's very easy. It's not drying in the screens. It's vibrant, and it's got these consistent colors and we can make some really vibrant colors on our shirts. And you can also print on a wide range of shirts. And when we're curing them, we can do it really quickly with a time dryer, and we can also flash being in-between layers. The only disadvantage to the processor is probably that you need some quite expensive kit to get up and running because you need a flash dryer secure in between layers, and even a small tunnel dryer, which is used to do the final key is relatively expensive. One other disadvantage might be that it's got like a slightly plasticky fill and the ink sits on top of the shirt, ones that have really absorbing into it like water-based and discharging. Discharging. This can be a really cool way of printing because save your printing lots of dark colored garments. You can actually use the discharging to kind of strip the dyes from the Garmin and just leave a very, very thin layer of pigment in there. And it just feel so soft. And the longevity of that print is going to last very long time. And it's just an optimum print method. There's some disadvantages. So you're going to need a nice big tunnel drives be able to force the area in really clear that design and get the chemical reaction to strip the ink pigment from the initial shares. So that probably suits larger studios a little bit better. And there can be some fumes if you're not going for the best discharging that are now formaldehyde, formaldehyde free. So there's the soft field, which is great. But then there's just a little bit more complex equipment needed for printing discharging. There are another couple of low disadvantages to using the discharging nx. For example, you're going to have to really draw attention to what garners you're printing onto to make sure that they haven't been dyed multiple times so that the cheaper garments can often have that problem. The other thing is that once you've mixed up being expanded very short shelf life. So you can't come back to in the next column days because the chemical reaction in the inks would have already happened and they won't strip the dye from your garments. And another one, unfortunately, is that they are going to be drawing into your screens a bit because the water is going to be evaporating up the inks. So they are very, very cool and I want you to experiment with them, but just pay attention that you need some expertise. And I wouldn't go straight into discharging printing, maybe start with water-based and then advance into that kind of area. I was suggesting an ink to go for when you're starting out in screen printing? Probably be plus the solid ink. There is that equipment that you need. But if you get going that you can just print really nice, rapid, vibrant designs that are consistent. And you can also get the inks that mix Apple two different pantone colors if you are printing for other people and their face specific on their colors. So I think Paso is the easiest one to use for the t-shirt design that we're going to be printing state, we're going to choose plus this all link. 7. Screen printing t-shirts: When you screen printing your shots, It's important to keep the shaft in place as you do your prints, especially for multi-colored prints. So what we do is we have some kind of tucking this and are plotted. So that might be a spray adhesive or even this, which is Joe sided pallet tape, is basically like double-sided masking tape and it holds the screen that T-shape in place while we're from zinc. So we don't want to happen is for when you do one print and then the fabric jumps, falls into a slightly different position. When you come to print the next one there, our register. So you won't be tacked down. So if this is perfect, for example, with the double-sided tape, it's going to hold it in place. And then as I print, it's not going to come up, lift and fall back into another area. So that's perfect. I'll show you the two options that we use. We used to use a spray adhesive like a light mist or wherever the plasmon. However, this just go a little bit messy and no studio, so we've kind of moved away from that one. And then this is the big double-sided Maschine tables, I'm going to describe it. And you basically roller on the flatten. And you can just keep activating it by taking off any excess length and it becomes tacky again and holds you in place for the whole treatment. If you have moving multiple platforms like us, it's really useful to keep your film positive in place until after you've done your test print. So you would do a test print on a different flatten. And then if there were any problems, you've still got your original one to register up against. We now need to Moscow file screens that anywhere where we don't want ache to go. So in that case, it's around the edges just in case where it's restful squeegee at the bottom and in my personal ink out into this area. And for this, I'm actually going to Moscow off my registration marks as I don't want those to print on my original test prints. So I can get it in Moscow for around the edges using some screen tape. It's really worthwhile getting some high-quality screen take. Just because packing tape leaves residue and it takes a lot longer to clean up. I just put it against the mesh and then I squeeze it into the the frame. Just put it all we route. I'd like to do my registration and take the covers, these registration marks from the undecided. That's just because the squeegee is going to be running over the image area. And I don't want to excite you if the tape off. I'm going to continue Maschine of my screens by doing the other two as well. I'm ready to stop printing. This particular design is going on the back of my T-shirt. So I can leave my shadows onto the flatten. Make sure it's nice and straight. If you do have side seems that actually makes it easier because you can keep them parallel with Coursera. And I'm actually going to load it right the way up to the seams and make sure it's nice and smooth and increases in, then I'm going to load up my income to each my screens so I can do that math. A couple of important things to consider when you are loading your ink is that you, you load it into a wall that's wider than the image area. You also want to have your squeegee, some kind of a medium geometry blades here, and they're also acquired and then my image area of both sides, but not so wide that they're hitting into the edges of the screen. I'm going to print my first color, which is this kind of creamy yellow color. My shirts or stuck down. Everything's tight. So I'm going to get my squeegee blade covered in ink. And I guess you might flood stroke. So the flood stroke is essentially filling up the ink them, the mesh with ink ready to print with. So it's not very hard stroke. It's just kinda like a skimming over the surface. So I'm just going to build a wall and then I'm just going to lightly push my ink all the way of the image. And then all that mesh is filled up with a nasty. And then you can push in poll, it's a debate in the screenplay community. Whichever one you feel is going to allow you to push that ink down onto the surface in the cleanest way possible. So these are quite large open areas. So I'm actually going to push. So we're going to push down until I can fill the board. And I'm going to keep the angle of the squeegee at 45 degrees. I'm going to stop before the image and I'm going to follow it all the way through. And I'm going to keep my body weight over the whole time. There's a couple of visual things that you can do to see if you print it out nicely. First is you can see if the mesh looks like it's all one color so that all the ink is transferred onto the shell. You can just lift the screen up and have a little look. Make sure you haven't missed any sections. This is down to practice and I'm sure you will get better, but just take your time Chrysler and make sure your force is even the whole way across. This is plus to solving. So there's a couple of ways I can do this. The way I'm going to partly dry this anchor, this point is by using a flash drive. So the flash dryer is basically like a grill and it will go over the surface and no heat the surface of the ink. The it's just touched dry. That's not the same as the ink being kid, which I'll do later in the tunnel dryer. So I'm going to flash this color, make sure it's touched dry in all four corners. And then I'm ready for my second car. After printing the first layer, I've gone unchecked or for extremes and it's not coming off from my finger. That just means that it's not going to stamp onto the underside of the next screen I'm printing. So I'm ready to print my second color. Again, I'm going to get my whole squeegee length covered in ink, so it glides across the surface of the screen and doesn't Bumble across. We're going to go with my wall of ink and I'm just going to lightly whilst holding the screen above. So I'm not printing to adding. We're going to lightly push the ink, sir, rolls over the surface of the image. Then I can. It's actually quite good idea to have a little bit, I think, for your squeegee so that the ink rose again and it's just quite smooth print. So I'm going to push down on the plaza and again until I fill the board underneath me. And I'm just going to slowly share the A31 to the surface of the tongue, say PABA, our way proofs. And at this point I can't do my flood for my next one, but I'll say that when I get into the actual printing. So a visual, by quick visual check, I can see that the mesh looks very clear. And then I can lift the screen up and have another little look. At this point, I can check the registration and it looks like a pretty decent job because There's two areas here which should be butting up against each other and they looked at on often cope, be able to figure that out fully in the next layer when I come to printing the black color, this is now ready for a quick flash and it just needs to be touched. Try again until I can do the block. I'm ready for my final lab, which will bring it all together. This is quite plus u. Again, give us greedy covered in the ink. This is particularly the case. You can stay, you're included Louisa, or even add some curable which Easter P1 that the viscosities be a little bit more. So I'm just going to do my floods. Sure. I got my ongoing and go the whole way across and shading through on Skillshare. I'm really excited about that looks really nice. Let me get it off the press and I'll have thorough inspection. But it looks like we did a good job on it. At this point. You don't need to put it onto the flash again unless you're worried about it touching itself when you pull it off. So this can go onto my conveyor dryer for focus. When we're ready to put this in the conveyor dryer, it's important that it's flat. And we're actually trying to get the surface of the ink temperature to about a 165 degrees. It'll tell you in your classes solving what temperature and how long to have it queuing for and eating for. This, a handy little thing. That just infrared guns and they're relatively cheap. And what it does is if you're quite close up, you can point the laser at the surface of the ink and you can see that it gets up to temperature. So when that when my dryer has been on for quite a little well, or be able to lean down queen at the ink surface as it goes onto the tunnel dry and make sure it hits that crucial. A 165 degrees for up to about a minute would be perfect. Then we can do a couple of little test to see if our ink his kid. Fortunately, at this point we're very happy with our registration, which is to do with the layers lining up and covering each other. However, it might be the case that your name is on measuring up and lining up perfectly with each other. So at this point, you would actually need to remove the ink from certain parts of your screen wherever this registration marks. And you'd have to look through the screen again onto the registration that's actually been printed onto the film poster. Hopefully that's still in place on your Platon. And you can refer to that, make adjustments and then print a new t-shirt. As we don't need to do any further adjustments on our registration. These tight. So then we can just remove this film positive affair. And we could actually load up all for plotting this with shafts because we're going to be able to move our classmates underneath the flash. Let that we're going to print each color, flash each color, and then build up the colors until we've got four complete shirts to fence in a combat Dre. We're really happy with how the back zines come out. So we're thinking about doing a front design as well now. And we'll get ies exactly the same method. Hello. Okay. 8. Printing inside neck labels: Now I have my back design printed and also my left chest. So I think we'll finish this show off is having an NEC labor with my brand name and the insight. So I'm actually going to use a slightly different pattern. So I'm just going to put that on now. I'm going to use the sleep Latin and then screen print directly into my Insert mac. This is the slave button and it just slides onto my press. And then I'm literally just going to rest my tee shot on that as I print it. When I've got that tape tough, it will be ready in a second. But just to show you, I'm going to just pop my t-shirt on there and let it hang underneath. And that just gives me the perfect amount of area to be able to screen print directly my inside next time. On my particular shell, I have quite a thick hand, so I actually don't want to be pulling across that hammer, want to be pushing the print up towards it so that I'm not like fumbling over it. I've also distinguished how high I want to be placing the share onto the pluses. And after that all the lines as a guide so that when I put my Sheraton, are going to line up against the top hem. And I've got just the right mouth area here to be able to push my design and screen print that in place. I'm also, I like to use different colors on my prints. So oh my goodness. Inside net cable, I'm going to be using the yellow from inside the eye because I don't think it's going to show through on the other side. And I think it's like quite a cool design feature that I like to work into all of my shots. So this is how my inside neck label came out, even managed to get the low registered sign. So that's pretty cool. She can get lots of DSL and NAL if you're precise about it. And I'm happy with that not being too much show through on the other side. So this is ready to go in the tunnel dry like all the others. And as long as I lay it flat, it should be able to still QA under the heat. Again, I'm still trying to get this to a 165 degrees for around a minute in order for that to kids nicely. So I'm going to pop it in the tunnel dry and get a kid. 9. Clean up: Now we've finished our print graph. It's really important to get the screen nice and clean and ready for storage. This particular image is going to be used for all of our designs as the neck label, logo that we've printed the inside neck. So I simply just need to remove this link and get it into storage. As this is past the solving the method that we're going to use a space simple. We're first going to take the accessing cough. Then we're going to remove the tape. And then we're going to use easily solve 701, which cuts through the process oleic. And we're going to put some of that on a rack and clean off all of the cross-selling ready for storage. If you're using water-based ink, you'd simply just need to use a sponge and some water to remove the water-based ink. And it is important to clean it thoroughly. So next time you come to print, It's really nice and clear. Okay? The answer is no. 10. Branding and packaging: A professional way to finish off your branding. Vot sheets might be to include swing tickets like this one. And then we've also got storage backs which a screen printed. We also include sweetie bags. These have stickers and also sweeten them as key. We also have mailers, which a screen printed too. Let me show you how we go about making offspring tickets. In order to add offspring tickets. We actually started when we picked our share. So with this kind of share, we have the size label and it's like a local heap. So we're going to actually attach the swing ticket to that label. We had business cards printed and these are lux, a 100 GSM cards that really thick. And we even took the time to print a low topper. And that will show us where to create a whole, to be able to attach from string, to be able to put it on our shirt. Say, I'm using an islet machine. You can get these from DIY shops. And then I'm going to create the whole first just in the top where that doc told me to. And then I'm going to put the Iowa and this just creates really nice professional finish. And then I can stop the islet to secure it. And then I use a little bit of black thread, loops through this size ticket. And then that will hang my swing ticket then read professional. All of our shots are printed in limited editions, so we'd like to show that off by adding a holographic sticker to the swing ticket so I can add my one on that. And then if this was a shop, you've even got room for a blockade on the back. So that looks really good and is a professional Finish. And now the easy part of branding that you can implement your brand is screen printing, your packaging. These are actually just free bikes that we use for our t-shirts to store them in. And we screen print. Nice, very much like how we did our T-Shirts. So I'm going to show you how we do that on press. You can use your carousel in much the same way as printing t-shirts to print simple paper and card. So here I have my back on my sticky Platon. And then I'm simply using a different style screen. So this one has a 1980 mesh, which just means that it's got fine holes and it's going to be OK to hold the detail. But nullcline too much ink onto our paper because paper isn't as, as absorbing as T-Shirts. Again, he is exactly the same type of squeegee. And then the income using is actually especially made for paper and card, and it's a water-based ink. So it's really easy to clean up with water afterwards. And we even only just needed to air dry. We don't need to put it under a conveyor dryer or Flash or anything like that. So I can go ahead and use the same technique that I used to print the T-Shirts to print these bags. Once I have that printed, I want to let it air dry. So I'm going to put it on my little rack, but you could lay them around the room if you haven't gone rack. So when they're touched dry, they'll be ready to use. We've used this exact same technique to print both of our backs. So a male is and all sweaty backs. And we've also even put stickies to seal our bags for when they're getting in the post. All these things together are going to make your brand look so professional. 11. Outro: Thank you so much for taking this course. I hope you found it really useful and we would love to see what t-shirts you print for your brand. Make sure to think about how many colors you have in your design, what finishing touches you might add to your brand, and even what type of t-shirt your printing onto. Let us know how you got on and contact us with any questions you might have so we can put you in the right direction.