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screen printing => General Screen Printing => Topic started by: im_mcguire on December 04, 2016, 02:36:09 PM
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So I have a client that wants 700 pieces printed on tri blend shirts. I can't run discharge due to ventilation issues, so I am curious how you would run this. Our clients always want a bright print with ubdervase, so this is a new style for us to print. We currently use Rutland M3 for ink. Could that work without, or would a straight water base ink be ok?
Any help would be awesome. Thanks!
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I want to note, they want a dulled look and not a distress texture to the ink.
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Base it down, and go through a finer mesh than usual. You are actually shooting for poor coverage.
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What color shirt?
What color print?
Depending on that... Waterbase ink could definitely work
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Two things.
1, If you are printing on TRI-Blends, then won't a thin layer of ink, high mesh, (no poly blocker) create bleed and random color shifts with the change of garment colors? That could be what you are looking for,...but may get textures of heather coming through the base.
2, To get a dulled look, seems to be a color choice. Choosing more duller inks than the brighter. Kind of "in the art".
Without textures adding to the vintage look, your basically just looking at color choices as mentioned above. Solid spot colors I take it.
Then, you have the factor of the garment. Tri Blend. I assume this already has a heather look? With thin mesh and solid spot colors, that alone, on a regular base, (no poly blocker) could give you a distressed affect without any texture pattern. That tho, doesn't really give me the idea of "vintage". More of a textured affect...with the possibility of a color/tint shift if changing colors of the garment.
So the Vintage look, must come from the art alone (I'm thinking). It's the style of the art you are relying on, not the print so much ??
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I'm sorry if the photo is small. There are 4different color inks on 5 colored shirts. District DM130.
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for me i would use a 230 screen - 1 or 2 strokes and thats it. no p/f/p
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we would do the same and run the higher mesh for the hand but also base the inks down with chino base
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Just to make sure that we are all on the same page, "vintage" generally conveys a look of age, with its ensuing fading through laundering and general wear.
Often (though specifically not this time) goes hand-in-hand with "distress", usually produced with an overlay, simulating wear and tear, with actual cracks and holes in the print.
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I'm with Andy, "vintage" is a bit ambiguous, to me that's wooden frames with stapled mesh...
Steve
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Just for kicks, check this out.
A client attached this picture to a recent inquiry about new shirts. It shows the fading and wear of ten years.
(The Champion cross grain shirt itself still looked great)
If someone wanted to duplicate this look, it would also need to be in the art. He, however wanted the new shirts to look like new.
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To me a dull look would be in the ink color selection. Like a rust color instead of red. I would achieve this by picking a muted color palette and basing back the ink with fashion soft or chino base and running it directly on the garment through a 230 mesh. If you want to hold the fibers down maybe under base with fashion base and flash and roll with a smash plate before the color.
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So I guess the "vintage" is not what I am looking for, maybe a muted color then... attached is a picture of what he is trying to convey with the ink, granted it will be a 1 color ink.
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To me, that look is still one of a little translucency, which on anything other than white, makes the color muted or duller.
This was the look popular a few years back when the WB thingie started really taking off. To keep the hand soft, the coverage wasn't there, and voila! the vintage look was born.
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Internally we call that Vintage Ink.
No Underbase (or very very little - maybe all light halftones) and a Different base (or base combination) (so many variables) mixed into your pigments/color boosters/equalizers/etc... Here we use UltraSoft Primer Clear from Rutland. Chino base would also work. Fashion Soft from Wilflex etc...
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Reiterating some of what's been said:
"Vintage" soft prints are one of the most popular things we do. Rutland M3, 230 mesh, sharp medium squeegees. 1 flood, 1 fast stroke. If you need a slight bump in opacity, do 2 strokes. If you want to keep colors as accurate (albeit muted) as possible, don't add base. Otherwise, you can add the soft hand base of your choice to make the print as soft as possible.
Also, you can print an underbase the same way, flash once, and top it, and you'll get a brighter print that's still fairly soft.
But here's the thing to remember, counter-intuitive though it may be: Don't try to matte down the fibers on these prints. If you've got enough ink on the shirt to hold them flat, you've got too much ink on there. For this style of printing, most of the time we don't even fully clear the screen.
Also, at least if you do it this way, it is possible the end user will get a little bit of dulling in the print after washing, due to fibrillation. We try to let our customers know to expect this as a characteristic of "vintage" prints. (No one has ever complained.)
Last but not least! Watch your dryer temps & shirts like crazy, do some tests before you do the run. In particular, Next Level triblend has given us terrible problems with discoloration/scorching/shrinking this year.
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Awesome Info everybody. I decided to bring the client in to do a press check on the first color combo. I decided to go with a chino based M3 230 mesh screen. Ill post photos of what the client accepts and what we go with.
Thanks for all of the help on this, you guys are great!!!
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Awesome Info everybody. I decided to bring the client in to do a press check on the first color combo.
Hate to say it but that's almost the only way to do it. Tone on tone/vintage means many different
things to different people.
Wait till they start asking you to print black on black. We do a lot of it and haven't done it the same way twice
yet.
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I believe that one stroke has a new line of inks out just for this.
Or make it yourself with the right base mix.
Murphy
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Well, we did a press check and like stated before "vintage" or dulled will be different for everybody's taste. What I think of when dulled is a 230 fast speed print, getting a very muted result, instead the customer wanted a somewhat brighter look than I thought. Almost 85% opacity. It really doesnt look far off from a "normal" print for us. So yeah, it is a good thing to press check especially when there is a lot of interpretation that can happen from email, to computer screen, to press.
Ultimately the shirt on the right is what they went with.
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One on the left looked better. ;) Customers! ::)
You did the right thing for sure. Whenever someone's new to "vintage" prints, I go to great lengths to make sure they know what they're getting, and we've definitely had instances of adjusting the process to suit the customer.