ciglar

I am working on a few shirt designs, and some of the companies previous designs did not print as they imagined because of halftones.
Please view the AI file to the left, and how the shirt actually printed to the right.
screenprintexample.jpg
Is there a certain percentage to stay within for most pantones?
I know this is dependent on the shirt color, but is there a guideline for this?

The printer wrote, "As we are using water based and discharge inks, the inks saturate the garment and thus half-toning gets tricky as we lose some of the effect vs. when using plastisol which sits on top of the garment."
Any suggestion on getting around this? Or a different eco-friendly printing method?

The only solutions I see are:
1. applying a white base coat
2. not using halftones, using more colors all at 100%
3. Not printing lighter color pantones on darker shirts
4. Another eco-friendly method of screen printing (not too familiar with this)

Thank You in advance!

 

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pbk!

Just curious if anybody knows the answer to the questions here.

 

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Flagrant-T

Are the birds supposed to be orange? If they are using discharge, you don't really underbase the print, you ad pigment to the discharge. On black shirts, you can usually get the discharge inks pretty close (but not exact) on the pantone scale. Some lighter color shirts don't discharge as well (which is the opposite of what I expected), also some brands use dyes that are not discharge friendly.

It is true that the ink will saturate the garment a bit, and is different than plastisol. It can be compensated to an extent by compensating for "dot gain" when the positives are made, meaning using a smaller dot on the positive than the final dot on the shirt should be, so when the ink soaks in it will be the right size.

Lastly, if you are concerned about being green, it is debatable on how green discharge inks are verses plastisol. There are a lot of threads on this already so I don't really want to de-rail this one, but there are several plastisol manufacturers that make non-pthalate plastisol inks and try to be environmentally concerned manufacturers. If you take into account the power requirements to print w/b, you can debate all day which is better for the environment.

Good luck (oh...and cool designs!)
Nick

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Flagrant-T

Woops! Just noticed this is a 4-year old question!

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Custom Screen Printing at: Flagrant-T.com and my Facebook Page

 

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pbk!

Yeah, I have been doing some digging around since I will be using discharge inks to print some designs that heavily use halftones. Thanks for answering. I think and hope that you will have helped more than just myself.

Since I have no client to worry about I am not too concerned about color matching. But am curious if you know by name which tshirt brands, or maybe even colors, are not discharge friendly.

Thanks.

 

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