Screen Printing 101- Part 3- The Good Stuff!

Part 1/ Part 2/ Part 3

Ready, Set, Get Printing!

©Michelle SaintOnge

First Things First. Tape Your Screen.

You will want to tape the underside of the screen anywhere that is open between your image area and the edge of the frame. This protects your work from ink that might squish past the edges of your image and onto parts of your print that it wasn’t meant to touch. If you have multiple images on one screen then you will also want to tape off the images you don’t want to print.

Then Register Your Screen.

This part of the process can get tricky once you begin to print with more than one layer of colour in a print. Generally screen printers refer to the term ‘registration’ when they speak about lining up each colour so when it prints it’s in the right place. If you are a beginner the easiest way to register a print is to place your substrate, paper or fabric, on the printing surface and mark with tape along the side and top of the paper. Then place your screen over top the substrate so that the image will print onto the desired area and mark the side and bottom of the screen. If you make more than one copy of your silkscreen then you will use the substrate markers (the tape) to serve as a guide for where to put your paper or fabric each time you put a new piece down. Then you will use the screen markers to serve as a position guide every time you put your screen down for a new print. This technique will help keep your image in the same area consistenly for each new print.

Lay Down Your Print Substrate

If you print with paper then you will want a way to keep the paper from attaching itself to the screen when you lift up the screen after your first print. If you have a professional table with holes and vacuum suction that should do the trick, but many people don’t and are printing onto a regular table top. If that’s your case then you can keep the paper down by spraying a small amount of light photo adhesive to the print table. Don’t spray too much; you don’t want to attach your print to the table either.

If you are printing onto fabric then you can use a table adhesive or you can pin your fabric to your print surface. While it is possible to ‘cheat’ and print onto a flat table top with fabric- your results will be much better if you print onto a surface meant for fabric printing. It’s easy to make your own. Read my tutorial on how to make a print table for fabric printing. If you use a table adhesive you should probably pin down a smooth vinyl so that the adhesive is easy to remove. I find it easier and faster if I am printing multiple panels to use table adhesive rather than pinning fabric. If do you pin your fabric down, pin down a drop cloth first. This is a piece of medium weight calico cotton or light canvas that has been washed. This will protect your print surface from inks and dyes that bleed through your fabric. The proper way to pin fabric is described here in my blog post on pinning.

Print Your image

Again, printing onto fabric and printing onto paper differ slightly in how they are accomplished. Luckily, if you can learn one technique adapting to the other is no problem.

When printing onto fabric you will begin by placing your silkscreen frame over your fabric. Pouring a bead of ink into the well of the screen.  You will want a bead that runs the width of your squeegee otherwise the rubber of your squeegee and the dry screen will stick and could move your screen out of position. Not too much and not too little is the rule here. There are a lot of factors that determine how much ink you should put down. How thick is the ink? Is it opaque or transparent? Is there a lot of open stencil area to print? Or are you printing a small amount of fine lines? Is it dry or humid in your studio? These are all factors that contribute to the ‘more or less’ rule. Experimenting will be your best judge.

Some screen printers will do what is called a ’strike-off’ at this point. A strike-off is a test print on the same fabric you will use for the final print. It will allow you to see how your image prints and whether there are any pin-holes, blockages, or if it prints well onto your chosen fabric and to test your colours. If everything looks great then continue printing.

The process of putting the ink onto your fabric is accomplished with a series of push and pulls of your squeegee across the screen with medium to hard pressure. To begin, set your squeegee into the ink in the well so that the majority of the ink is in front of the squeegee. Angle the squeegee slightly (about 75 degrees) and push or pull the ink to the other side of the screen. The ink will create a vacuum with the fabric beneath and should keep your screen from moving. That being said, if you are printing onto something that has seams or something else that keeps your screen slightly raised you may want to hold the screen with one hand while you pull to keep it from moving.  When you print onto paper you will likely have your screen in hinge clamps and it won’t have to be held in place. I have found that when I print an image that is very small and has only fine lines there isn’t enough contact surface area to create the vacuum with the fabric and I need to hold the screen in place while I print. Once you have made your first pull you need to tap the squeegee to remove most of the ink. Place the squeegee behind the ink and angle it towards you and pull the ink back across the screen  for your second pass. When you print fabric you often do four passes. With paper printing you will likely only need to do one pass if you flood your screen before hand.

When you are finished you want to lift your screen off by lifting one side and then the other. This helps to not smear or smudge the print. You can remove your print while wet but set it aside somewhere protected that it can dry (a table, a shelf or a drying rack).

If you are printing onto fabric with water-based inks (I recommend Permaset) the last step once your print has dried is to heat cure the pigment inks so that they may be washed and dried without incident. *Pigment inks will cure on their own in about a month. So if you wish to skip the heat curing just remember to mark the date when it should be fully cured.*

Putting the fabric through a drying tunnel or into a heat box is what most professionals do but you can use one of these three methods to cure your print at home:

• A household iron. Initially, you must air dry your fabric completely. Then with your iron on the hottest setting and no steam, iron the reverse side of your fabric for a full three minutes. Wash a test piece.
• With your oven. Again after air drying, fold piece, wrap in aluminum foil and bake at low heat (90’C </=190’F) for an hour. Test a piece of the fabric.
• Your laundry dryer. After THOROUGH air drying, place in tumble-dryer for say 30 minutes on hot and test.

However, I must warn you that more does not always mean better. Too much heat runs the risk of singeing the garment and overcuring, which will actually compromise the wash-fastness and will crack the print.

Lastly, you will want to scrape off any ink left over and put it back into a container for later use. Take your screen and thoroughly wash out the pigment making sure your get any that is hiding in the creases and set you screen aside to dry for your next use.

You can always email questions about printing to me and I will be happy to answer them in an upcoming Q&A post.

Thanks and Happy Printing!