Discharge Nation - discharge screen printing blog

Recent printing.

I’ve done a lot of shirts since the last time I was actively blogging. Here are some of the more interesting ones.

Discharge with neon pink pigment!

White discharge, black ink, green discharge on Gildan Military Green g200.

Bright discharge clear on Cardinal Red Gildan g200, which discharges extremely well. Normal red discharges not well, like a light red, but Cardinal does an awesome job of discharging.

Meshuggah is an awesome metal band, heavy and weird technically. Sometimes called “math metal.” I needed a shirt. Search for “Future breed machine” on youtube to get an idea of what they sound like.

Real small printing of my logo on a shirt amongst other sponsors. Here is the shirt:

It was orange discharge and gray discharge on Alternative Apparel shirts, which are awesome garments.

Discharge with violet and purple pigments mixed in as I printed.

These dogs are awesome. I did a lot of shirts for a couple who breed them. This was straight discharge and reddish pink discharge for the tongue, and then on light shirts I did black ink and the same reddish discharge because it showed well on almost all shirt colors, light or dark.

I print weird stuff.

I have to mix, test print, remix colored discharge over and over to get the right shade. This is one of the shirts on which I do it.

I love when I make cool shirts for big companies. These were for Marvel in NYC. I did some tank tops yesterday for Pepboys, for a special event in LA, but I didn’t take any pictures unfortunately. The lady from Pepboys marketing was super nice and I think I will get more small special orders from them.

I’ve done some softball shirts lately. This was for an architecture firm here in Philly.

Halftone print of a jellyfish!

Another softball team order. Once I’m all set up with vinyl, I can finally do unique names/numbers on the back of softball shirts. I have lost work previously because I couldn’t do that. And now I can.

Bright discharge clear and yellow discharge, same as what I used for the Yardbirds shirts right above.

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Vacord Custom Vinyl

I know I’ve neglected this blog for a long time, but it is still popular. I want to start writing again. I had just run out of topic ideas, but I’ve got a few now, to start again.  If you have any questions for me to address here, or topic ideas, please email them to me.

Last week I bought a vinyl plotter/cutter, a Roland GX-24, so that I could expand my services. Wednesday the necessary 16 foot usb cable came and I could finally set it up. Here is my first vinyl attempt:

So far, vinyl is awesome. It is very different than screen printing, and seems much easier and more straight-forward. I plan to offer laptop decals like above, as well as wall art vinyl, car decals, window decals, cloroplast signs, auto plates, banners, one-off t-shirts, one-off bumper stickers, unique names/numbers on the back of team shirts, etc etc. It’s been very exciting! Doing my first door decal here at the shop was a similar feeling to doing my first shirt, or the first time I printed discharge. Here’s that door decal:

Here’s a link to the vinyl section of my flickr if you’d like to see what I’ve been doing.

Next, I’m going to design and cut lettering to go on the back of my van to advertise.

If you need any vinyl, please contact me. I plan to be offering vinyl commercially in early June.

Thanks for reading. It’s nice to be back.

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Printing gray under discharge white

I had an order this week for a Jiu Jitsu club at a school in Philadelphia. The customer provided a mockup which had gray and white, with the gray showing in some places through the white. I told him I could probably replicate this in print and he said give it a try.

Instead of separating the layers in Photoshop and butt registering them, I just printed the full art in grey, then the white on top. Eliminating registration is cool when possible. So, I printed the gray (mixed from a previous order, Matsui inks, probably spot black, trans white, and 301 white), then flashed it, then did one layer of Matsui Discharge White on top. They came out pretty neat, with the gray being visible through the white.

I always enjoy when I can give some artistic input, suggest ideas, and experiment.

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Distressing artwork and distressed printing

Distressing is popular. If you’ve ever seen shirts that look like they’re really old, and that the print is worn, but you know that the shirts are new or relatively new, then the artwork was probably just “distressed”, which is a process to make it look cracked, old, worn out, etc.  I’ve printed distressed artwork a few times, but last week was the first time I did the effect myself to artwork. It’s pretty easy.

Basically, you just create the distressed effect in Photoshop. You could probably do it in Illustrator as well, but I used Photoshop so that is what I will cover. I took a distressed effect graphic and used it over the artwork the customer provided. Go here on screenprinters.net, and scroll down to Distressed Look Overlays. Download those files (thanks to Scott Fresner for providing them!). Then load your artwork in Photoshop as well as one or more of these Distressed Overlay files. Simply use the magic wand to select all of the distressed effect then paste it on top of your own artwork. You can then use Fill (hit Ctrl+f5) to change the distressed portion to white or otherwise your background color, and the distressed layer will block your artwork, making it look distressed! Easy enough, right? I hope that makes sense. Play around with it. There are four different types of distressed effects at that link, ranging from really small in detail, to larger. I used more than one to get this result on the Frat shirts I did last week:

You can of course do it to multiple color artwork too! Just make sure the distressed layers are on top of the actual art layers, making them the same color as your background (white for printing films.)

So that’s the artwork portion, and illustration of the end result, but let’s not forget the key portion between artwork and end result, that is, the actual screen printing! Distressing is easy on screens, because instead of trying to take out small or even tiny portions of the screen/stencil, you’re leaving small pieces, which is always easier. I used 230 mesh count screens, but even with low mesh screens, low to medium detail distressing would work fine. Just burn your screens as normal and they should wash out fine, creating the distressed stencil. Here is one of the screens from that print run:

There you go! There are several threads on The T-shirt Forums about this process if you want to learn more.

Someone asked in a comment a while ago if I was ever a teacher. The answer is no, never formally. I was very active with WKDU, Drexel University’s student radio station and I instructed new DJs there, and also tested them when I was Program Director.  I’m really into Krav Maga and want to be an instructor at the school in a year or two, when I’ve worked up to become a Green Belt. Right now I’m a Yellow Belt, so I’ve got a ways to go.  I have taught other people about screen printing, and am doing a private lesson next week. If you’re in the Philadelphia area and are interested in taking private lessons with me, please get in touch with me. My phone number is at the top of the page.

Business is very slow but I will try to blog and at least post pictures as interesting work comes along.

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Christmas gifts, screen printed of course.

I like to screen print gifts to give to family at Christmas time. This was the third Christmas since I’ve started screen printing and the gifts are a little more advanced than previous years.

My father and I fly hot air balloons and he requested a balloon sweatshirt. This is Matsui Discharge White on a Forest Green Gildan sweatshirt (G800 I think?).

ICE CREAM MAN. I did one for my sister and one for her fiancé. Matsui mixed dark gray ink and also speedball brand glow in the dark ink for the trim. I am really surprised that the speedball glow in the dark ink works so well because they are generally a pretty poor ink company.

Purple hippos on Alternative PE shirt for my sister.

I made a few of these, including one for my sister and one for her fiancé (they got a lot of shirts this year!). I had left over red and yellow discharge so I put both inks on one screen to get this variable color effect.

For my future brother-in-law, dark gray and straight discharge inks done on an Alternative Apparel tonal stripe shirt. Weird. He liked it.

This was straight discharge on a blue Alternative shirt that just didn’t discharge well, so it came out grayish. Still cool but hard to see really. The artwork is a page from a 1960s Beatles coloring book.

This was part of my halloween costume this year but I also made one for future bro-in-law. His is on American Apparel, mine was on distressed Alternative with grinded hems so it looked old. I just did one layer of Matsui 301 white so that the print was faded. My costume was a time traveler supposedly from 2036 so I had an old 2028 shirt on that was worn out.

Orange owl on a yellow Alternative shirt.

French man printed in white  and yellow discharge on a purple Alternative shirt.

That’s the majority of the Christmas printing I did. I had a nice holiday and I hope all of my readers did too!

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Best discharge red I’ve ever produced.

Well it’s been a while since I’ve blogged. When I first decided to start blogging I wrote a long list of topics and then continued to come up with topic ideas, but I have written about all of those by now and new ideas aren’t coming to mind often.  My business is very slow so I am not working a lot and thinking of new topics nor am I producing shirts worth talking about. But I will try to blog at least once a week from now on. If you have topic ideas, please please email them to me . I have started using twitter, which I sort of hate but am rather hooked on, and I do sometimes mention what I’m working on, so if you want you can check out my twitter.

Anyway, I did some shirts for a local band called Axe Populi. I don’t know what they sound like but their artwork was pretty cool and I know a couple of guys in the band so I was happy to work for them. It was a white and red design on black shirts, a very common combination, but one that can be an intimidating combo for waterbased printers.  With WB inks, you can’t do red on top of a white underbase like you can with plastisol, because you get pinkish. You can supposedly use a clear coat between the white and red but that adds another screen/color and I’m not into that.  So what I do is use white-pigmented discharge (Matsui Discharge White) and pigment some red discharge (Matsui DSPF binder).  Pigmenting discharge can be a pain, as it takes a while and can lead to unfavorable results. In the past I’ve just used Matsui’s Neo Red MFB pigment added to straight discharge and it can give a nice red, but generally a darker, almost bloody red. This order called for a bright red, which I had never quite gotten before with discharge. I mixed some discharge and added a lot of Neo Red and test printed and it was a red certainly but not what I wanted, so I added some PC Red 032 pigment, which is an orangish red, and it definitely made it brighter. I added a little more Neo Red, test printed and saw that I had finally gotten a good bright red! I made extra as I always do (I don’t want to ever run out during a print job) and I’m saving it to make some Krav Maga shirts for my school.  I printed 30 of these shirts in 20 minutes, doing wet-on-wet with red first.

The up-close shot shows the color of the red better, brighter, like it actually was.

I did these through 160 mesh screens. My exposure unit, a HIX tt180, uses multiple sources of light to burn screens, which is causing light scattering, which is shrinking stencils relative to their films in white mesh screens so I had to stroke the red layer of artwork a couple of pixels in Photoshop to try to alleviate this so that these two colors would still butt properly.

It felt good to be printing again after the slow holidays.

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Today’s work

Work has been very slow, but today was good. I did three small custom orders. Slow work combined with the fact that I’ve pretty much covered all the topics I can think of is why I don’t blog as frequently of late.

First, I wanted to make a Krav Maga shirt for myself, a design idea I had this weekend. I have a bunch of yellow-pigmented discharge left in the fridge, so I figured I’d use it. This is on a brown Alternative shirt through a 160 mesh (I think):

I do a lot of printing for the Uhuru Solidarity Movement. Here is the latest design:

A new customer wanted some shirts printed for his Yoga studio.  He provided Alternative shirts. The first I did were pink/red burnout tee’s. I had never printed on burnout before.  The shirts are also 50/50, which complicated the desire of the customer for me to use discharge ink, but I just told him that I was interested in seeing the result so I was willing to experiment.  I mixed in Matsui metallic binder to make the discharge sparkle.

Blue Alternative shirts and the customer wanted blue and pink printing, and he picked out some inks from my shelves so I didn’t have to mix anything.  The blue didn’t pop well after curing. It looked better before going through the oven. Hopefully the customer will be fine with it being subtle like this. The metallic pink looked good.

I’m going to do an experiment later this week, using the left over discharge ink with metallic binder as an underbase, and the metallic pink on top of it, to make a very sparkly pink on black.

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Screenprinted Vacord holiday cards

So this year I decided to send out some Vacord “season’s greetings” cards. I went through my records and picked out good customers and clients, anyone with whom I enjoyed working or who gave a sizable order, and I sent cards to these people, along with my distributor, the people at EZ Squeegee, and my parents and sister. I felt it was a nice thing to do and hopefully it will encourage those people to come back next year for more orders.

I had printed cardboard before, and posterboard as well as sticker paper, but never cardstock like this.  I used two 305mesh screens. Remember that when printing paper, you don’t want to lay down much ink at all since it won’t be absorbed like it will with apparel, and when doing fine text like this, you should use a high mesh anyway. I chose this font because it didn’t have any serfis, which would be a nightmare at this minutia.  The inks are Matsui RC Pantone Green and Rubine Red.  I registered the films then took one sheet of the cardstock and lined it up on the platen to match the stencil, then marked the platen so that I could load the rest of the sheets.  I had made the screens so that a set of four would be printed at a time.

Business is extremely slow right now. I have to get more active and pursue work since it isn’t coming to me like it used to.  This economy is awful and custom shirts aren’t a necessity, so I’m going to have to start calling people and convincing them that they need my services. It doesn’t sound fun and I’m not looking forward to it, but I’ve got to do something to survive.  I’m taking advantage of this slow period and working on xmas presents, screen printed shirts and sweatshirts for the family. I’ll post about those prints but not until after the gifts are received.

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A 3color this week and weird exposure problem

I did 20 of those this week.  Black 2001 American Apparel with a red-pigmented discharge through a 180, discharge-white through a 160 and a grey mixed from Matsui 301 trans white, opaque white, and spot black through a 160.  The red started to misbehave and not lay down cleanly towards the end. The customer is going to order more, and I’ll do it through a 160 next time, which may keep it from misbehaving but could also lead to bleeding in the time that the other colors are being printed. At first I was doing red then white, flash, then grey/flash/grey, but did most of it it red, spin, white, flash, grey/flash/grey.

They came out fine, and the customer was very happy, which is the most important thing. This print illustrates some problem I’m having with burning low mesh screens that have to butt register. See the grey and the white, such as the “OH” in the text? They don’t butt register perfectly, but the films do. There is something going on during the burning process that is making the designs burn a tiny bit smaller than the films, which prevented this from butting properly, leaving a thin gap where none should be.  Monday I need to do some test burns and try to figure out what the problem is. Dennis at Westix who sold me my exposure unit, a HIX tt180 table top vacuum unit, said my burn time was probably too long and light was sneaking around the black of the film, so I reduced burn time from 6 minutes to 4 minutes for white mesh and I will lower it even further during my experiments.

This week I also did about 475 discharge-white prints.  Next week I need to do a tight 4color on white shirts, so I need to resolve any burning issues ASAP.

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Positives and negatives of discharge printing

A while ago someone from Columbia emailed and asked about the positives and negatives of printing with discharge inks. I’ll go over some of them here.

Positives:

• Cool effects. This is why most people seek out discharge printing. Virtually no hand after the first wash, you can see the weave of the shirt, and the print becomes part of the shirt. Those are the main “cool” factors involved.
• Quick to print. It’s just one layer so you can print it rapidly. With a 1color discharge, I can print 90 to 120 an hour, and I’m not even that fast compared to other pros.
• Wet-on-wet ability. Printing “wet-on-wet” is when you can print multiple colors without flashing between them. That makes printing faster than if you were doing multiple spot colors and had to flash while printing. If you have a 3 color discharge print, say red, green and white-pigmented, you would print the red, spin to the green screen and print that, then do the white-discharge print, pull it off your press and put it on the conveyor belt. I did a 6 color discharge once, and I printed each shirt in about 45 seconds.
• Profitability. It’s a special service, discharge printing, and becoming in higher demand, so you can charge more for it. A printer can make maybe one or two dollars more per print of a straight discharge than a normal one color print.
• Bright colors on darks. The best way to get a bright color on a dark shirt with waterbased printing.

Negatives:

• Difficult to mix colors. It’s a real PITA to try to pigment it. I’ll mix up some straight discharge, add pigment, test print it and see how that comes out, add more pigment, test print again, add more, and on and on.
• Can’t do a whole lot of detail. It clogs, so you have to use a lower mesh count screen. I find 156mesh ideal.
• Bleeds. It’ll clog a screen, but it’s also a fairly thin ink, so if you are running it through a 110 or 123, it will drip through the screen if you walk away. Even with a 156 you really shouldn’t stop printing very long.
• Doesn’t work on all garments and colors. Discharge will give some funky results on certain shirt colors, and a lot of garments and brands just don’t discharge well. If a shirt doesn’t discharge very well, your colors will be darker than you want.
• Short shelf life. You can’t leave it on your shelf for more than a few hours. It’ll keep in the fridge for a while, but not indefinitely so it ends up being wasteful when you have to toss it. I always end up mixing more than I need but it’s better than running out of it, especially if it’s pigmented, during a print run.

That’s all I can think of right now. Happy printing!

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