Flock Printing T-Shirts – A Graphic Designers Guide Did you know that some factories electrify t-shirts to create a flock t-shirt graphic? Me neither! There are three ways (that we know of) to produce a flock print on a t-shirt or garment. In this definitive designers guide to flock printing t-shirts we will go over the differences, art requirements, available colors and best practices for flock printing from a graphic/apparel designer’s point of view, but before that, what is flock or flocking? Continue reading Flock Printing T-Shirts – A Graphic Designers Guide
Fluorescent Ink – The Definitive T-Shirt Designers Guide Back in the 80’s apparel design was all about bright fluorescent (also know as neon) prints or bright fluorescent fabric colors, fast forward from the 80’s and a lot has changed. These days the clothing market isn’t flooded with brightly colored, in your face, neon colors, rather fluorescent colors are subtly used in graphic designs to draw your eye to a specific part of the design. Continue reading Fluorescent Ink – The Definitive T-Shirt Designers Guide
High Density Ink – The definitive print guide for clothing design Seeing a High Density print for the first time, my initial thoughts were, “that’s amazing! how’d they do that? When and how can I try this?” The 3D text protruding from the t-shirt graphic engaged my creative curiosity and so I delved into the wonderful world of High Density Inks! Continue reading High Density Ink – The definitive print guide for clothing design
Screen Printing Puff Ink – The definitive designers guide. Puff Ink is a standout favourite, literally! Puff ink (as the name implies) expands on all sides once exposed to heat at 310°F (155°C). This specialty screen printing ink is created by combining regular plastisol ink with a puff additive. There needs to be enough puff ink laid down on a garment in order for it to expand enough to notice, a general rule of thumb is so not have any lines or small details in your artwork that are less than 1pt. Continue reading Screen Printing Puff Ink – The definitive designers guide.
Plastisol, Waterbase, Discharge…Oh My! The 3 main screen printing ink types and what you need to know My number one tip for creating garment graphics is to start with the end product in mind and work backwards from there. Having said that, before actually diving into designing the graphic you need to commit to understanding the different screen printing ink types available to you, as it will then allow you to achieve the design style you have envisaged without wasting valuable time. A classic example of knowing your craft (and something that actually happened to us), was one design that had a very fine, distress texture throughout it. We wanted the print to feel soft to touch, so we specked the artwork to use water base ink. When printed, the delicate details dried up in the screen, rendering them basically invisible, it appeared to be a flat color design with only the roughest sections of the texture shown. A better solution would have been to make the texture twice as thick, so that even if the finer details dried up a little it wouldn’t completely disappear or become one large ambiguous splotch. In this master class we will take a look at the different types of ink for screen printing. There are three main types of screen printing ink that all inks are derived from. So it won’t take long to learn the key points and knock your next t-shirt design out of the park! Continue reading Plastisol, Waterbase, Discharge…Oh My!
Screen Printing Metallic Inks: The Definitive Designers Guide. In this definitive designers guide to metallic inks, we cover: creating a metallic ink effect in Adobe Illustrator, screen printing with metallic inks, proper garment care instructions and there’s even a free high-resolution metallic ink texture giveaway. Continue reading Screen Printing Metallic Inks: The Definitive Designers Guide.
