Okay so this is my first screenprint job using a speedball supervalue kit. I did a decently detailed artwork on my computer using Illustrator and did the screenfiller method(very time consuming I knew it would be but ya...i'm silly.) anyway...
The screen came out looking rather nice.
Okay here is my process of what I've got ...
A speedball value kit with a 10x14 screen which won't do what i want but it's just to learn the process, etc and to learn the techniques before i put money into something more expensive...
I'll show you a series of pictures of what I've gotten so far: (this is my artwork for one of my tshirts, sorry it's so huge...
Here is my first finished screen of it at 10x14 which really isn't impressive and won't do the size that you see on my graphic obviously but like i said, just practice...
And here are the shirts...
shirt 2:
I printed them on shirts I didn't like as a test...hopefully I get better at this..
Also, the speedball kit didn't come with any lubricity stuff to help keep the stuff from drying quickly so my 2nd run might be lighter due to drying of the screne before teh 2nd shirt was prepped... I think I also didn't press hard enough...but who knows...
Okay now don't make fun of me but what is the flood stroke exactly?
It's something a lot of new printers don't know about, so I wouldn't make fun of you for it. It's a pass of the squeegee (with ink) with the screen off the t-shirt - as if you were printing, but with the screen up so you don't actually print onto the fabric. It gets the ink evenly into the mesh for a better print.
It looks like you're getting dry patches where the ink just isn't really getting into the mesh, so I thought that was one possible explanation (and a common problem).
That's a truly awful explanation, but hopefully you follow? If not a forum search for "flood" should turn up some of Richard's past explanations, which are a lot better than mine
(much better) however shirt 4 was a bit lighter but it wasn't lighter because of the stroke i think it was lighter because i did it on black shirt...any pointers for black shirts? Some spots were real bright (very few)...
Thanks for your help it worked much better with the flood stroke
Yeah, I was actually referring to the squegee-ing side of the screen (the one you completely mess up with ink). But my fear is that, since you'll be stroking through it away from the shirt, the paint will go through the stencil and completely mess the other side... Is that the case?
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Are you just a blade of grass blown by the wind?
Yeah, I was actually referring to the squegee-ing side of the screen (the one you completely mess up with ink). But my fear is that, since you'll be stroking through it away from the shirt, the paint will go through the stencil and completely mess the other side... Is that the case?
Negative! It doesn't squeeze through enough to mess anything up it's just filling the tiny holes on the screen with ink before you apply it to the shirt so that when you do push it through on the shirt the ink that remains will push the ink in the holes onto the shirt giving it more applied pressure. Essentially if you don't do the flood stroke first then when you do your first print stroke it's having to fill holes and push to the shirt which most of the time seems to be too much for it and it causes it to be lightly printed.
Hope this helps.
Good luck!
I did a few successful prints now using the flood stroke method.
My only question now is how to make the red show up brilliant on the black shirt, my red was really dark.
If you're using waterbased inks, there are transparent inks and there are opaque inks. Transparent inks for use on light fabrics, and opaque inks for use on dark fabrics. So you might need to use something with an opaque base. You could also use an underbase (print white onto the black, then print the red over the top of the white).
please help! faded prints with speedball 
