‘Not only are standard polyurethane/polyester boards made from petrochemicals, but the production of them releases incredibly harmful chemicals into the environment. Put this with their typical lifespan and it is clear that there is definite room for improvement on how boards are made.‘

It looks like the James Otter approach to this problem has been without compromise in all repects, the finished boards look amazing and have now been thoroughly tested on our Cornish coastline. In addition to producing an incredible product there is (at the time of writing) an invitation to the customer to be a part of the creation process. In my opinion it would be well worth making the most of this opportunity.

I would like to think that one day I might get to own one myself, although this would require finding the time to use it, getting back in the water again is high on the agenda but screen printing, right now, seems to be taking up every waking moment. Speaking of which the T shirts….

An obvious choice, Earth positive Organic T shirts screen printed using water based inks. Only the best for Otter Surfboards.

The design uses only three print colours, but still allows for the image to be printed across a full range of  background colours. The waterbased discharge inks used to create the print require no under base, this saves on screen costs and the softer print is ideal for the size of the image.

Mark Mayers T shirt design also makes good use of a photoshop engrave plugin, this is a great alternative to tones made up of standard photoshop lines, ellipses, diamonds etc. A very powerful plugin which is ideal for screen print.

As far as Advertees is concerned we always take the position of promoting the best organic T shirts, and the most environmentally friendly options for screen printing T shirts. Unfortunately many of our customers are not able to justify the extra cost for a variety of  legitimate reasons, and we totally understand that for 90% of our customer base an organic, fairly traded product is simply not within budget. For similar real world reasons we are unable to offer a ‘certified’ organic product as the expense of eliminating the possibility of cross contamination (fibres and dust from none organic T shirts) is simply not an option presently.

So it is refreshing to find a company that does not compromise (as we do) and requests a product to match their own in terms of sustainability.

Neals Yard remedies offer a range of  ‘organic natural health and beauty products‘ . This phrase is very familiar, the cynical among us, and those people who are are little weary of green washing, may be doubting this claim as they read it.  But in this instance we (Advertees) are assured by the sincerity of a company who are willing to spend a little more on promotion and merchandising because of a genuine belief in sustainability over cost. Neals Yard Remedies use the following  phrase ‘This passion, and our firm belief that it’s down to all of us to protect our precious planet, is at the heart of everything we do’  and in our experience this has proved to be true.

The T shirts supplied for this job were from earth positive, the water based inks used to print this design were supplied by grafco. It was printed at 85LPI using newman screens and a mesh, the inks used were supplied by screening west a UK supplier of grafco inks.

Although not certified, Advertees can supply T shirts printed to the highest environmental standards, it is our policy to advise clients that screen printing on to dark coloured T shirts is not, in our experience, an environmentally friendly option, despite the claims of some organically certified T shirt printers. Advertees does provide a quality non formaldehyde water based discharge printing solution, but we prefer to reinforce the following. Printing on light coloured T shirts in water based inks has far less environmental impact!

Yet good promotional T shirts do not require the whole colour spectrum to make an impression, a good bold single colour graphic in one place on the shirt is often more memorable, and more eye catching than multiple multi coloured graphics in every position imaginable. So perhaps less is more? and a lot cheaper too.

On this basis Advertees are now promoting cheap single colour printing T-shirt Deals on short print runs of 50 and 100 shirts. The emphasis is on quality of print and T shirt as we think promotional should not mean disposable, Advertees think cotton is to precious a resource to be used in such a wasteful way, this is also a reason to avoid building diposability into a promotional design, people will wear a T shirt they grow fond of  until they are thread bare, this is obviously very good long term promotion. So rather than supplying a cheap disposable product, Advertees have been able to bring the cost down through the quick set up times they are now able to achieve.

We have also made a stretching table for our Newman Frames (it consists partly of old aluminium stretch and glued screens) which now enables us to achieve a consistent 40 newtons without any of the mesh distortions that can so easily occur when stretching by hand. Nearly all of our stretch and glues have been auctioned off on e bay, all of them sold within 2 days (it seems there is an army of eager screen printers out there looking for used kit). We kept some screens back for possible projects similar to the Newman stretching table, as box aluminium seems to have very many uses. But in terms of screen printing it is now Newman roller frames exclusively , we love them.

With equinox and the cold weather now officially behind us we are feeling very optimistic about the weeks to come.

The more use we make of water-based inks, the more we realise some of the benefits offered from a production point of view. In the first 2 months of 2010 we have seen significant growth in customer enquiries specific to water based inks (and surprisingly further enquiries from fellow screen printers) .

This is an incredibly positive start to the year, even to leave the environmental benefits out of the equation, screen printing with these products sees added customer satisfaction and a very high rate of return custom. Many of the prominent online T shirt printers have now stated they offer this service, lets hope this continued growth in interest and use of water based inks will lead to faster product development, and availability.

The new machine will bring much needed added capacity, and make better use of the large gas dryer we have recently installed. Waterbased printing becomes viable for more orders as we increase overall throughput. There has been some nice designs this summer, and it is a shame we have run short on blogging time when there are so many interesting jobs going through our workshops. This post brings the grand total for July to a whopping two.

The above print uses a grafco clear base and is on a white earth positive T-shirt, the first picture in this article is a discharge print on yellow american apparel.

and below: Fully acro’d up for removal of partition. This will allow us to run two automatics on our gas dryer.

and the chickens carry on oblivious to our efforts.

Fonts convey a lot of information, designers go to great lengths to get this right, a good collection of typefaces is a must. Your choice of font will help you convey the other important element. Your T shirts slogan, catchphrase, saying.

Colour combinations will also play an important part of your design, this seasons colours, or classic black T shirt, large bold brightly coloured type, or modest colours and designer fonts.

Here are some of our favourite designer slogan T shirts

katharine Hamnett

Henry Holland

And a site which has a bewildering selection of type only T shirts

TypeTees

Enjoy!

Butt or trap registration? What are they?

• Trap Registration. This is essentially an overlap. When screen printing on dark garments all colours require a white underbase to improve there opacity. Without the overlap there is a danger the white will still be visible at the edges of the colour printed on top. Screen printing on textiles is a tricky business and very slight movement can occur in the fabrics and the screens, especially when heat is applied (the white underbase needs to be flash dried before applying the colours,  trap registration creates a margin for movement. If applied correctly the overlap will be barely visible on close inspection. In a programme such as illustrator you can take the underbase back using a stroke of 0.5 .
• Butt Registration. separations set up to register perfectly without overlaps. This type of registration is hard to achieve, but well worth the extra set up time on longer print runs on light Tshirts, especially when using water based inks. It helps to prevent bleeding of colours and the need to flash cure between colours. This type of separation can also be used when discharge printing. Butt registration requires a perfectly aligned printing press, if you have uneven palettes and worn registration pins you may want to stick with the afformentioned Trap registration.

The above information although relevant to all screen printing does mention movement and press inaccuracies, this is with the assumption that 99% of people reading this type of article probably don’t have access to modern precision machinery. Most professional screen printers should not experience any of the movement mentioned,  and use of trap will be limited to white underbases only.

The Newman screens have been a massive investment in terms of time, but the benefits are already becoming apparent.

We were a little apprehensive about taking on Newman rollers as there are many screen printers who claim they are too difficult to use. But we decided the good reports were far more prevalent, many T-Shirt printers claiming they could never return to using glued screens. So what are the benefits of Newman’s? A tighter screen mesh (measured in Newtons) allows for

1. More accurate registration
2. Quicker set up times
3. A more uniform deposit of ink on the shirt

The screens can be re-tensioned, so these advantages will never be lost, and the life of the screen mesh is prolonged. We also benefit from savings on screen emulsion, and inks. However there are some problems to be overcome

1. The initial time investment is substantial, there is a lot to be learnt
2. The various sundries required are not easily available in the UK
3. Newman roller screens are a serious financial investment
4. Screens will tear easily at high tension

All the above are not really ongoing problems, the return on investment put these initial set up costs and frustrations into perspective. The screens are incredibly well made, our screens were acquired second hand, they had been very well used, but once cleaned up they were as good as new. We have not yet invested in a stretching table from Newman, and at the moment we are happy to stretch screens by hand, we can achieve tensions that are nearly double those of our glued frames. This was only possible with a few tips from Butch at Stretch Devices this video quite possibly saved us hours of torment, we are way behind Butch on his time of 7 minutes for a screen but working on it

So far so good, back to looking for locking strip, and extending the screen drying cabinet. Then our next job is to organise the pin registration system, this is where we should be able to reclaim all the time we have invested over the last 2 weeks.

Advertees T shirt printing with Newman roller screens.

2011 update: As we had hoped, these screens are really paying for themselves. The initial time and money investment is long forgotten. We now have a stretching table , and an extended screen room allowing Advertees to process higher numbers of screens per day without losing any of the stencil quality.

For any design up to 14×16 inches most screen printers will have no problems or restrictions, however, all over T shirt designs and large T shirt designs can be problematic. Oversize T shirt prints are now becoming more popular than ever, but they do require the correct machinery such as belt printers or even customised hand printing and automatic carousels. They also require a large dryer. Large format autos and belt printers have high set up costs as they require larger screens, bigger film etc, and high minimum orders are required to absorb these costs. So how does a small label get their designs printed the full length of the shirt? Advertees is presently looking at solutions for smaller labels, and the above design is one of  our larger prints produced on a standard size screen, Advertees can supply prints of 40cm x 50cm (avoiding seams if possible), it uses a discharge water based ink for a soft hand, as plastisol ink over such a large area of the shirt would have unsatisfactory and uncomfortable results. We would advise that given the added expense of film print outs that a minimum of 50 shirts would apply to oversize prints. And although we are unlikely to offer all over T shirt prints, we are able to print top to bottom on most T shirt sizes.

Advertees regularly screen print neck labels, and sleeves for small independent labels and bands. the above image shows a sleeve print being applied to an oversize T shirt print.

In the space of a couple of months we have printed two cheerleading T shirt designs, this is up on the previous 30 years, in which time we printed absolutely zero. We are interested to know if this is a sudden surge in cheerleadings popularity in the UK, or this type of work has just been passing us by? Both designs made use of metallic inks, Razzle dazzle made use of the excellent waterbased binder and gold metal flakes from Grafco. The designs are often American old school in style, and lend themselves perfectly to screen print, nice solid areas of colour which do not require super tight registration.

Now classed as a retro look, fluorescent T Shirt Printing is synonymous with the 80′s. It is not a regular customer request, but now and again it crops up. The key to a good quality fluoro prints is underbasing, the pigments are not very opaque and a good white background is essential. For the T shirt print in the above image we put down 2 whites before printing the fluorescent green and magenta, the colours consist of an opaque water based binder with 10% pigment. Good quality pigments are always advisable.

Cromatex 2000 is made by Grafco and supplied by Screening West

This job was printed on organic T shirts from Okarma, and printed using water based products. Geeks in the basement was produced for a competition winner and will be flown out to Oz! So although these T shirts are printed using environmentally sound methods, the air miles clocked up by them will make a nonsense of it. First and last time we ship this far I am sure.

Photography by Tony Plant

The last few days have been the coldest we can remember. After a well earned rest over the Christmas period we were all keen to leap into action and set about tackling our already growing list of screen printing jobs, however,  we were soon to realise that very little could be done without our water supply. Here are 5 good reasons no screen printer should be without a good water supply and well insulated pipes.

1. Tea and coffee.

   Nearly every member of the Advertees team has a tea or coffee requirement, in order to achieve maximum efficiency the supply needs to be maintained.

2. Washing out screen stencils.

   It is impossible to wash out stencils without water, borrowed water in a container can sort out the tea and coffee crisis, but will not help in making a good silk screen stencil.

3. Reclaiming used screens.

   Again, this is an impossible task when you do not have the use of a good pressure washer.

4. Washing ink from screens.

   Although not ideal, water from a bucket can do the job, although I would not recommend it, you may also resort to plastic inks which can be washed out with various toxic screen washes.

5. Afternoon Tea.

   Previously assumed as a workers right, this is now a cherished moment, all water is used sparingly throughout the day to ensure this ritual goes uninterrupted.

These temperatures are unheard of in this part of the world, it has been an interesting 2 days. We are fully operational again with a new found respect for our water supply, full steam ahead and we should catch up on our orders in no time.

We get artwork in a whole variety of forms from finalised vector graphics to a quick sketch on a shopping list.
For this demonstration, I will use a sketch of Woody Allen put together in photoshop.

To start with, this has a wide variety of textures and is fairly colourful. The idea here, is to produce a stark, single colour print. Woody’s going to need simplifying and that means combining all the tonal areas into black.

One way is to adjust the levels (image/adjustments/levels), another way – and the one I have used here – is simply to pull the contrast up and the brightness down. When you’re happy, save the file.
For screening simple graphics like this, as with so many other things, vector is best. Vectorising a piece of bitmap artwork will give it ultra crisp lines instead of the blocky edges we associate with bitmaps.
Open up illustrator or another vector program, and take the image into it.
You can draw over the sketch using the pencil tool. This way, you can do some cleaning up of the lines as you go.
However, if it’s speed you’re after, you should always try vector tracing first. As well as, usually, making a very good job of it, tracing often introduces interesting and useful effects of it’s own.

Here we have the bitmap sketch (on the left) and a quick trace using the default live trace setting in illustrator.
Even at this size, you can see how a lot of the messiness has been cleaned up by the simplifying action of a vector trace.

If we go in closer, the difference in line edge clarity is obvious. This will print nice and cleanly.

It could well be argued though, that some of Woody’s character is lost – look particularly around the mouth where the shadow has become decidedly angular.
Here’s where the tracing variables can help.

This time, I’ve gone into the options and taken the path fitting down to 1 pixel. This gives a trace with a much higher fidelity to the original image. Too far in this direction, however, can result in the actual bitmap pixels being traced! If the original is of a low resolution this can happen, and will result in something which is still rough looking. You should make sure that your original image is of a good resolution to start with if possible.

Another setting which can make all the difference is blur. Using this tool can turn ragged lines into smooth, flowing ones which tend to look quite organic. For simple shapes particularly of an abstract nature, curlicues and the sort of floral patterns commonly seen in artwork today, this might be just the job. Also the blurring of a trace can impart a ‘glossiness’, or sort of plastic sheen etc. Depends what you have in mind.

Here’s Woody again with the blur turned up to 4 px. It’s often a trade-off, trial and error, but again, the higher quality the original artwork the better.

However, we have to try and work with what we receive and often all we have is a low quality piece of artwork. Tracing does not always work. Under these circumstances, we have to re-draw, and a drawing tablet, such as a Wacom can work wonders – so much easier than using the old mouse.

The most simple T shirt designs are often the most effective, I love Kernow T shirts are a good example of this. A timeless design that utilises White T shirts, simple printing in two colours, with a clear message. Easy.

Waterbased t shirt printing by Advertees

Discharge screen printing is one water based solution for light prints on dark clothing or textiles. It ticks the environmental printing boxes, but it is not without it’s limitations. Firstly we would not use this method for printing orders of less than 50 T shirts, the reason being the ink has a shelf life of less than 24 hours when mixed, this means there is waste on small orders or in a situation where ink use cannot be predicted accurately. Ideally we like to see print runs of 100+ for this process. Another draw back is in its ability to reproduce accurate colour across a range of different materials, discharge ink is a bleaching agent which when combined with pigments will colour the shirt, unfortunately the underlying colour of the garment to be printed is rarely white and will affect the final print, the underlying cotton colours that are most often found are pale blue, pale cream, pale pink, all will have a grey tone to them. Quite often black T shirts can be stock that has been re-dyed, so a T shirt may have been coloured red originally and later changed to black, a batch such as this can be problematic when using the discharge system.

It is not possible to use discharge printing on synthetic materials, an 80% cotton content would be the minimum requirement in our opinion. True whites are hard to achieve, and good bright reds are also very difficult to make permenant and these are things to consider when designing for this process. Greens yellows and blues are bright and permanent. Although an organic solution for screen printers discharge printing will need a wash before wear label.
Despite all the draw backs of this technique there are some circumstances where it excells, the final print has no discernable texture to it after the first wash and can be ironed over.

A pique knit polo can present problems on very detailed prints, to fill the holes in the weave with ink and maintain good edges is tricky. We find, as ever, that water based inks are a good solution. The very nature of water based ink allows for both an even and opaque print, without losing the edges. A plastisol ink has a tendency to sit on top of the fibres of the shirt, there is no absorbtion of the ink and as a result the plastisol may want to spread out when trying to fill the holes in the knit. This can result in very tiny details filling in entirely, below and above is a close up view of water based printing of a detailed design, its ability to cling to and shrink around fibres makes a big difference in retaining all detail.

This T shirt design from Chris Lanyon speaks for itself. A four colour screen print using opaque waterbased inks from Grafco. The colour came up good and bright, but we think we could have put more ink down with a coarser screen mesh.

Om Padma of Cornwall produce a nice line in Yoga tops, a print run of fairly traded hoodies printed using waterbased ink. The brightly coloured hoodies are printed using an opaque water based screen printing ink which is 90% bio degradable, the pigments used to create these vivid colours are too strong to enable the discharge printing method. The hoodies are organic cotton in conversion from epona who also produce a good range of fair trade T shirts.