I'm posting this in hopes it will help someone who has had the same questions that I had. The image is a drawing of a girl setting on a hamburger holding french fries. Yesterday I experimented with discharge printing and process printing. I have done very little process printing before but not discharge. My customer wanted black shirts with a multi-colored image. If I were to do spot colors it would have taken 9 screens. My machine is a Vastex V 2000 HD 6/4. I decided to do a process print but I didn't want the hard feel of the white plastisol underlay because I would have had to flash it to get a vibrant white, (too thick). I decided to try my hand at Discharge printing for the white underlay. I used Matsui Discharge White Base for this. Not a strong odor, It worked great. I tried to do wet on wet with the white discharge under base and lay the process colors on top but it came out looking very washed out, it turned my colors into pastel colors, not vibrant at all. So, I layed the white discharge under base and activated it with my spot dryer. This worked very well. I had the spot dryer about 6 inches away. After the image came out from the spot dryer I let it cool off by turning my machine to do the next image away from the dryer. I layed all the process colors on top of each other wet on wet. I set my oven belt on a very slow speed. The shirt stayed in the oven for about 45 - 50 seconds since the Discharge was started under the spot dryer. I mixed my White Discharge Base at a ratio of 4% activator by weight to the Discharge White Base. I used Wilflex Process C M Y K for the process printing. I did my separations in Photoshop. I did not halftone the white under base screen. For the under base I used a 155 mesh screen. For the CMYK screens I used 305 mesh screens with a halftone of 85 lpi (lines per inch). I used an hp Laserjet 5200 to print my positives on Casey's Better Than Vellum. For the White under base I treated this like a spot color. I outputted my CMYK screens at a resolution of 600 pixels/inch since this is what my printer print at.
Cyan Screen 85 lpi Screen Angle of 75 Magenta Screen 85 lpi Screen Angle of 15 Yellow Screen 85 lpi Screen Angle of 105 Black Screen 85 lpi Screen Angle of 45
I was very happy with the outcome except that the skin color was very hard to achieve. Next time I have something like this I think I will add another screen for just the skin (flesh color). I posted these images of doing the job along the way. If anyone has any questions please feel free to ask and I hope this will help any one who has had questions about things like this.
I tried to add pictures but, can't figure out how!
I'm new to the forum...where are the photos posted and how do I find them. I'm printing a process job this week and am worried about the white underbase, using maxopake white plastisol.
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