In the 19th century a wooden frame was being placed over a piece of fabric to hold stencils in place during printing. Later in the 20th century, this process became mechanized. This process is called screen printing (often also referred to as silk-screening) and is a method used to have graphics printed on fabric, paper as well as wood, metal, plastic, and even glass. The transaction from manual to mechanized printing gave a start to a new era of printing capabilities.
Why is it so popular though? Of course, the quality and the colors of print and paint have the most important role here. For instance, when working with t-shirts, paint doesn’t actually soak in the fabric but it stays on the surface which speaks of a high quality.
Screen printing is popular for the bright colors it creates. Although it has a color limit, screen printing provides brighter colors than other printing technologies do, thus becoming the most popular printing technology in the world and staying most people’s favorite. Besides, it makes it easier to create different copies of the same graphic.
Now, let’s have a guide of how screen-printing steps follow one another. Of course, like all the other techniques, screen printing has some important stages that need to be carefully completed.
- The stage of design- First of all make sure your design looks just right.
- Screen preparation- a screen which matches the fabric etc. is chosen and it is covered with a layer of emulsion which hardens when bright light is on.
- The stage of color- Usually thick paints are used in screen printing which promise the high quality of the print. If several colors needed, a t-shirt may undergo several screens prints to apply each layer of the paint. After some time, the emulsion that had been applied over the screen hardens, helping with the design shape creation.
- Ink pressure- The ink is pressed against the item through the screen after which the item is dried and checked in case of a need of some corrections.
