Screen Printing foil on T-shirts
Advertees will finally introduce foil to the range of screen printing techniques on offer, just a few more trial runs using different screen meshes and pressing times and we are good to go. This is not the most environmentally friendly technique as foils are supplied on a carrier which is discarded, but the effect is not one which can be achieved by any printing inks we have tried so far, and as the number of requests we recieve about foils has grown in recent years, we thought it was time to give it a proper try out. The technique is very well suited to our set up and is ideal for printing alongside water based inks.
Our first try out was using gold foil as part of a rough raster graphic, to see the effect of cracks, splatters and half tones. The details came up well, and therefore screen printing has obvious benefits over the cad cut foils. The process was certainly not as time consuming as we had anticipated.
So our first impressions are good. Our next graphic will be a vector graphic. Clean edges and a super smooth finish is no doubt a harder look to master, but we are confident this will be achieved very soon. The only real problem we had was trying to photograph the print for this blog, this design was printed on an ocean blue Gildan Ultra T shirt, but the foil has played havoc with the camera, hence the sky blue and other variants on display here.
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