From Artwork to Printed Silkscreen in 15 Minutes Flat!

Introduction: From Artwork to Printed Silkscreen in 15 Minutes Flat!

By ccrome Follow

• Photolithography is super flexible, but requires some investment in time, skill and money to get right.
• Vinyl cutting by machine (with the TechShop's vinyl cutter) is great, but even a moderately complex design requires a significant amount of time, and skill to weed. Complex halftones are impossible. You only have 1 session with your screen if you use the TechShop's screens because you need to give it back at the end of the session, so it's not reusable.
• Vinyl cutting by hand is even hand has all the disadvantages of vinyl cutting by machine, but with the added pain that you have to cut the vinyl yourself.

• reusable
• durable
• takes only minutes to create from any artwork
• can support any islands and even full grayscale halftoning
• uses way less ink than a standard screen (probably about the same per print, but filling the screen only fills the areas of printing)
• so fast and easy, you'd be happy to do it for only 1 shirt!

• Epilog Laser cutter/engraver. Other varieties may work fine too.
• Silkscreen printing station (optional -- I did it at home for what you see here)
• 9" Silkscreen squeegee (actually, I used a 6" $0.50 squeegee from Tap Plastics)
• Corel Photo-Paint. (Can just as easily be done with Photoshop, but instructions here are for Photo-Paint)
• Custom silkscreen frame. I just cut out a frame from 1" MDF using a table saw and scroll saw. (the 15 minutes does not include build time for the frame. )

• 2 mil Mylar sheet. I got this from Tap Plastics. They also have 5 mil mylar, but that didn't work. The 2 mil stuff comes on a roll and is about $1.50/foot (24" width). Get 5 or 10 feet and you can make a lot of screens :-)
• water based silkscreen paint
• tape

• Laser Cutter SBU
• Silkscreen SBU (optional -- the prints you see here were done at my home without using the silkscreen station)
• Wood shop (optional -- if you make the from some other way, you don't need the woodshop)

Step 1: Download and Open the Template: Total Time=1 Minute

The Attached file, "I smile because I have no idea whats going on silk.cdr" is a template for you to use. Important things to note: This is designed for a 9" squeegee. You can modify as you like.

Only the black frame and the artwork are on a printable layer. The frame (red) and usable space (green) guideline are on a non-printable layer.

Attachments

Step 2: Drop In, and Crop Your Artwork. Total Time = 5 Min

Drop your artwork into the location indicated by the red square.

Step 3: Cut Your Screen! Total Time = 10 Min

• print both RASTER + VECTOR
• RASTER: 75 DPI, SPEED 60%, POWER 20%, Floyd Steinberg dithering
• VECTOR: 100% SPEED, 30% POWER, 5000 PPS

This step will take between 30 seconds and about 3 minutes.

Step 4: Tape Your Screen to the Frame. Total Time = 11 Min

Step 5: Go Ahead and Do the Print. Total Time = 15 Minutes

And, here you go:

• float some ink over the screen before putting it on your t-shirt
• put the screen down onto your t-shirt
• slowly squeegee the ink into the t-shirt, making sure everyting his held steady
• lift the screen.

Step 6: A Close Up Look at the Screen Produced

Here's a close-up of what the screen looks like (after printing and washing). Thanks for the comment DIY-Guy -- it gave me the idea to get a good image of what's going on close up.

The 75 dpi from the printer driver is right on, and this also shows us we can probably go even a little higher for a tighter screen.

Interesting. it looks as if the steps in the vertical direction are not perfectly uniform. In fact, far from it. And, there is some misalignment in the left-going vs. right-going scan lines.

It looks as if you may be able to go *slightly* higher in DPI, but not a lot. Maybe if we try slowing the print speed down and lowering power, we might get more uniform and smaller dots. That'll need some investigation.