Sublimation Printing for Beginners. Get Started, and Start Selling Today!

1. Intro: Welcome to my latest Skillshare class on sublimation printing. I will be showing you how to print onto mugs and coasters, as well as most. My name is Hannah and I'm from handmade designs. I create products from my lettering and we've sold over 14.5 thousand customers worldwide. I'm going to be showing you how to start sublimation printing and start selling today. I'll be explaining to you what printers and what equipment you are going to need to start the process today. This class is for you if you'd been toying with the idea of sublimation printing, not sure where to get started. It's also ideal if you already have a heat press and some of the equipment. And then look into further expand on your business. By the end of this class, you will have a finished printed sublimation product. And hopefully an item that you can start selling in your Etsy shop website or via social media channels. So without further ado, let's head into our first lesson. 2. Talking Sublimation Failures: Before going ahead, I just wanted to talk about some expectations when it comes to sublimation printing. And that it can be that sometimes things don't always go to plan. That is just a honest review of the process. And just from years of printing. And I just want to come from a place of letting you know about the failure of race, etc. So for me personally, when you're starting out, you can expect lots of failures. You try and different temperatures you're trying different pressure settings on your machine. You're trying different ink settings on your printer. Now, I can give you examples of what works best for me, but it might not be best for you and your equipment. And just the end result of what you're looking for, you have to take into consideration that there are going to be failures. There may be a couple of mugs that don't work out. Saying this, once you've got your settings down to a T, you can pretty much expect the same results every time, which is why it is great for business. Don't get me wrong every now and again, you can have a design that may not work and that just maybe down to the blank itself not having enough sublimation coating, for example. And then that's just something outside of your control. When you do get everything pretty much right, you can expect fantastic results every time. But for me it's as simple as pop in the press on printing out the design and getting it printed. 3. Equipment & Materials: For this class, you are going to need either a mug price, a flat press, or cold press. I'm going to be showing you how to use all three today with sublimation printing if you only have one of them, simply skip ahead to the lesson that's appropriate to you. If you are looking to see how you want to expand your business in which one to choose from. I'm going to be showing you examples from all three. Today. I'm going to be using a flat press press. And in WordPress. I will also be using a Rico printer. And the saga sinks that are compatible. In order to create an end product for this class, you are going to need the equipment for it. But if you're just having a look to see if it's something you want to get into. You may have a look at the video just to see what's involved, the steps and the equipment or so. But like I said, if it is something that you are looking to create an end product in today's class, then you will need some heat resistant tape. Ideally a heat resistant glove, because the things we are going to handle are at very high temperatures, sublimation paper, the sublimation income printers, some blacks. All of these can be purchased from places like eBay, amazon, or if you're anything like me, I managed to find a local company to us. I do visit them, they're up the road from us and I really liked to work with them. But again, likewise, if you just head to Google search sublimation supplies, you can order in different materials. Sometimes it is a case of trial and error and seeing what works for you and what works for the business with a list of equipment and materials in mind, let's head into our first lesson, which is mocked printing. 4. File Preperation & Mug Printing: Before I begin my design, I'm going to go ahead and put them up, purse on. I've set my mug person 345 degrees Fahrenheit with a time of a 100 seconds. And whilst that is getting ready to heat up, I'm going to be over here working on the design for the mugs. I'm going to be working in Illustrator today and I'm going to just find one of my illustrations that I made. So I'm gonna go ahead and drag that in. And I'm going to want to make that much smaller. And then I think I might add my logo. That's my heat pressed be pin telling me it's ready and up to temperature. So I'm going to go ahead now and print my design. If you're printing marks, you want to keep this design relatively small. I'm just going to copy and paste that. So we've got another one to use. Once I'm happy with my overall design, I'm gonna go ahead and highlight it all. Go to Object, click Transform. Want to go ahead and reflect that page. Wouldn't sets it to vertical. As you can see, everything is flipped. Click, Okay. Then I want to go ahead and click File Save as. And if I just put it on my desktop for now, then I'm going to want to go ahead in the format option and click PDF. So here I'm going to save the file as test print and hit Save, click Save. Then we want to go ahead into our finder. Search for test print. Will find it as a PDF. Double-click it. Here you will see the design come up. Go ahead and click Command pay, footprint. And make sure we're picking our sublimation printer from the Settings below. Then simply hit Print. Now that we have a design, I'm going to share with you a little bit of a hack which I like to use. And what I actually do is mark out the back of the design by going over to the window and using it as a light box just to mark out where the design starts and ends. So when it comes to putting the design onto the mug, I can see clearly how it's going to align. As you can see here, my marks that I've just lined up. So I'm gonna go ahead and cut the designer. Now. You just want to go ahead and just use some scissors and just do a really rough I'm going to put that one aside for later. And then using some heat resistant tape. We're going to take how Mark tariff a piece of tape a little bit one side and another, the other side. And then we're going to put down, broke down and just find a position that looks right for the mug. I'm going to go ahead here. And I usually take my ruler and just see if that's in line. So we've got 4.8 and then go ahead and make those same 4.8. And then we put the tape down. We can't see much of the design, but we can just see my outline as a rough guide to go up. Now, it's time to head over to the press. Now that I presses up to temperature, we're going to take our mug, place it three-week the handle upright and then close the clamp. You want to make sure that the pressure on this is just right, not too tight, not too loose. And it is something unfortunately that you do have to play around and experiment with. Again, we want to make sure that the design that is facing the heat element downwards and not facing up. Otherwise we won't get to quality print. But once we're happy with the settings of the pressure, we're going to go ahead and close the camp. You will then see that the temperature is going to fall because the mug isn't temperature. When the Mach is to the temperature that I told the press that we want it to be so it will bleed. And when that mug bleeps, we will then go ahead and count down the timer. I'm going to leave that now. This'll take a minute or so. So I'm going to leave that where it is and wait for the mug to heat up. I can hear the price is telling me that the mug is now up to temperature and it is time to hit the button on the time of which for me it is the square one. So we're just gonna go ahead and let that paint down. Now, the process night told me that the time is done. We're going to go ahead and click that same button. Just to take up the timer and released the clamp. Your mug. You can turn the machine off if you need to carefully peel back your design. Now you have to be careful with this because if you do move anything, because the ink is still active with the heat of the mock, it will smudge it. So this has to be a very careful step. So again, just peel away you're tight and lift off your design. Here is the finished design. As you can see, it produces high-quality results. 5. Coaster Printing with a Clamp Swing Press: My next piece of equipment is going to be the Clamp press. And it's called this because you can literally fold the lever and the whole process will go flat. There's no uneven edges and it's great for working on smaller items. It will pivot and swivel, which is great. I'm gonna go ahead now. I'm switched that off. I've got my temperature 281. For the coaster, I'm gonna go ahead and use the design that we've printed earlier. Turn it around. And I'm gonna go with the floral ones. So I'm just gonna go ahead and quickly draw around it. See if that fits. As you can see that it's going to fit within my circle. Just quickly cut the take your coast up with the sublimation side. Once you're happy with the position, take a small amount of tape and just put it to one side just to keep the item in place. We're then going to go and take this over to the heat press in my settings, set it to 180 degrees, and then in the time I'm going to set it to a 100 seconds. So we're going to bring that all the way down because I was working on some ceramics for this in particular, I'm going to bring it again down to a 100 seconds. Click Okay. And then it will go back to heat enough. And we're going to play just a couple of minutes and let the heat press heat up. The price is now bleach to tell me that it's up to temperature. So I'm just going to close that just for a second. Just to take the timer off, I'm going to push it away as we go and get out design. Here's the design with the wooden part taped on. So what I'm going to do is go ahead and the coastal side down and the paper side. Then I'm just going to get a ketone Teflon and place it over. And this is just going to protect between the plates and the product. You want to make sure your pressure is correct for this. And you just want a medium pressure. This is something that is quite hard to describe through a camera, but it is just something that you will feel by tightening and loosening screw here when you close the price, you will feel that pressure between the plates. And again, like I said, you want to try and find a medium pressure? I'm just gonna go ahead and give that a few turns clockwise to tighten it and close the clamp. Then you will see my timer count down. We're just going to step aside now and wait for that to happen. Machine is now sleeping to tell me that the timer is up. So I'm gonna go ahead and reverse the process that we're going to take the clamp up, push it away, carefully, take the Teflon sheets off. And then you will see our design. And we just wanted to go ahead and simply peel away the backing paper. I'm going to be using a heat protection to have to take this off the press because it is very hot. As you can see here is the design that I have just printed. I love florals. I work on my iPad and I do a lot of my content creation with the camera. I just wanted to try and include all those elements in a little fun logo for myself. This is what I've made. 6. Mouse Mat Printing: My next step is going to be using a price. And I'm going to be showing you how to actually print onto a mouse model. We want to go ahead and have a look at our settings. So I'm going to click this mode setting here. Temperature is at 180 and our time is at 15 seconds. So I went to, I'm fine with the temperature, but I just wanted to take the time up plus button here and take that all the way up again to around a 100 seconds or so. It's happy with that. I click mode to return, but also heat press heats up. I'm gonna go ahead and show you how I created a design on the iPad. This is the design that I came up with. It's just some simple lettering that I did with a bit of color. I think what I'm going to do is take that whole design a little bit smaller. So I'm just gonna go ahead and drag that into the middle of my design. And I want to go ahead in my settings and flip that. And once I'm happy with my design in procreate, I want to go ahead and save it on my files. So I'm going to save it as a PDF in the best quality and save that in my files. Sublimation, most hit Save. Then I'm going to head over onto my laptop to print the designer. Here is my design. As you can see, it is printed backwards. I'm gonna go ahead and take that over to my workbench and position my mouse mat. They do a really quick quiz out with that. I'm just in my quick template again, just so I can roughly see where that will fall within the circle. Once I'm happy, go ahead and tape the design brand. And then we're going to take it over to the press. My heat press is not to temperature, so I'm gonna go ahead and place my design over on the press. Again. I'm going to put a typhoon sheet over the top. Simply close. This pressure was set to a different job before, so it's too loose. Tighten the screw clockwise. I'm twice the comp. Carefully take away Teflon sheet. And then we want to be really careful with lifting the design. This is going to be really hot, so I'm just going to place this over to the side to cool down. Here's what the design looks like. As you can see, the colors are nice and vibrant and matches those of my iPad. 7. Outro: I hope you've enjoyed today's class. If you have any questions about sublimation or the process, or if you have made any of the products that we have demonstrated in today's class. Let me know in the comments below and I will be sure to get back to you try and answer those as best as I can. You can also find me over and YouTube just by searching homemade signs all over and Instagram at homemade underscore designs. And hopefully I will see you in another class coming shortly.