The Screen Printing Process

It's helpful to know the basics of the screen printing process when you are ordering shirts.

In the screen printing process, the printer prepares a screen with your image on it and passes ink through the screen onto a shirt.

You can think of the screen as a stencil. The parts of the screen that should not print onto the shirt are covered with a photo emulsion. The parts of the screen that do print onto your shirt (and form the printed image) are left open for the ink to pass through. This is all done digitally.

The black areas of the graphic represent the areas on the screen that are covered with a photo emulsion so the ink cannot pass through. Ink will pass through he uncovered (white) areas to form a design on your shirt.

Next, the screen is placed on the press and a thin layer of ink is passed through the screen onto the shirt using a squeegie.

If your design consists of more than one color, the colors of the design are seperated before the screen is made. If your design is red and green, one screen is made for the green and one screen is made for the red. The screens are placed on the press and the first color is applied to the shirt, and then the other color.

When you want to screen print a photograph (or a graphic with many colors), a process called "four color process" is usually used. Your image is seperated (digitally) into 4 colors--Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (CMYK). The combination of these four colors creates the illusion of a photographic image. If you look closely at a color photograph in a magazine or another printed piece, you can see that the image is actually made up of tiny little cyan, magenta, yellow and black dots.