T-Shirt Printing – What Is Involved?
To produce printed articles of apparel for advertising, retail and fashion, there are three fundamental methods of screen printing that are utilised. In t-shirt printing, ‘Spot Colour’ printing is the most common and works exceptionally well for a great variety of graphics. Spot colour printing is best used when printing graphics which are usually not very photographic in nature.
The colours of the inks to be used in the reproduction of the graphic images are usually Pantone specified colours chosen by a graphic designer. Pantone coated or uncoated colour references are chosen to specify the ink colours of the design. The Pantone system is a global standard for colour matching where every colour is assigned a unique designation.
Spot colour printing is well suited to printing branded promotional garments or items in which colour identity and uniformity needs to stay the same throughout a varying range of items.
“4 Colour Process” is another method of t-shirt screen printing. This method of printing is used mainly for photographic images and illustrations that consist of a wide range of colours, tones and graduations. Hard covers, paperbacks and periodicals all use the same four-colour process.
Reproducing the colours of the original image requires a mixing of translucent inks on a white background. This is rather more difficult process to achieve on a fabric than it is on paper. The methods are pretty similar. If you are going to use this kind of t-shirt printing it will obviously only work on white garments and will not work for coloured fabrics. This type of printing is only right for use in print runs of one hundred or more. This is because it simply costs more to set it up. A process called “Simulated Process” is used in cases where garment screen printers copy full colour pictures using coloured cloths. The artwork is separated into various colours and shades using a method similar to spot colour printing to achieve the overall look and feel of the original image.
For transferring heavy metal imagery and fantasy imagery from CD covers to black T-shirts for band merchandise, this popular method is used by printers everywhere. This type of printing is the most expensive. For that reason, it is used entirely on large print runs. This is because it costs more to set up the colour separations, and it takes a greater number of colours to print the pictures.
