Discharge Nation - discharge screen printing blog

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.