What Does T-Shirt Printing Involve?
For the production of printed garments for promotions, merchandise and fashion there are mainly 3 particular methods of screen printing employed. 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.
Ink colours used in remaking graphic images, are usually Pantone, as specified by the graphic designer. Pantone coated or uncoated colour references are chosen to specify the ink colours of the design. The Pantone matching system is an international colour reference used in publishing, printing and design whereby each colour is identified by a unique pantone name and number.
Branded promotional garments, or other merchandise where color identify and uniformity must stay constant, are particularly well suited for spot color printing.
Another method of t-shirt screen printing used is called ’4 Colour Process’. The type of printing that is used, relates mainly to images dealing with either photography or illustration, as well as having a large degree of colours, tones, and graduations used. The images found in many books and magazines and printed by the 4 colour process.
The transparent inks blend with one another on a plain white backdrop to recreate each of the colours and shades present in the original. This is certainly a much harder procedure to do on material than it is to do on paper. But the method used is about the same. This particular sort of t-shirt printing will, obviously, only be effective on white cloth. It won’t work on coloured garments. The print set up costs are higher than that of simple spot colour designs and as such only suitable for larger print runs of 100+
When garment screen printers reproduce such full colour images onto coloured fabrics a method called ‘Simulated Process’ is used. Using method similar to spot colour printing to achieve the overall look and feel of the original image the artwork is separated into various colours and shades
This is a standard method used by all printers and most popular for example with the reproduction of heavy metal and fantasy imagery taken from CD cover artwork and reproduced onto black t-shirts for band merchandise. This is the most expensive form of printing and as such used only on larger print runs due to the higher set up costs involving the colour separations and larger number of colours used to print the images.
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