Let's Talk Images
A t-shirt is all about images. A message you want the world to know or a picture you want your friends to see. What you print is just as important as how you do it.
You've found the perfect image that would look great on a shirt, how are you going to print it?
Simple. Sort of. You need to take that beautiful, colorful picture and turn it into black and white. Why? You'll find out in just a minute.
Remember the transparency paper I listed in the materials section? Since we're screen printing via the emulsion method, our image needs to be printed onto one or two transparencies in black ink. You can choose whatever color paint you want to print the shirt, but your transparencies need to come out in black only.
Say you've chosen this picture:
Yay, Asian Kung-Fu Generation!
Ahem. Using your favorite imaging software (I'm using Photoshop, but you can certainly use Gimp, Paint, or even Word) and turn the image into black and white. Think of the image as a stencil-if you were making a stencil, the black part of the image would be the part you cut out so that when you ran the paint roller over it, the image would print.
Similarly, the black ink on your transparency will serve to block out the ultraviolet rays from your exposure lamp. When you wash out the emulsion, the parts previously covered by the black should wash out easily and thus make your image t-shirt printable.
Here's how the picture turned out. Now just turn that printer on and hit 'print.'
While you wait for your printer to finish printing, enjoy this music video by
Asian Kung-Fu Generation...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment