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Sublimition on Black T-Shirt Question?

3K views 28 replies 14 participants last post by  NoXid 
#1 ·
If I want to do sublimation on a black shirt, can I use screen printing to create a white under base and then sublimate on top of it? If not, then what are some alternatives?
 
#2 ·
You are looking for a flavor of "unicorn". An affordable, durable, low-hand means of printing low-volume, full-color art on dark garments.

While the ideal of the unicorn is unattainable (at least so far), there are various ways to cobble together an old nag with a toilet paper core stuck to its forehead. What you suggest is in theory one of them. Sublimation works with plastic, polyester in particular. Screen printing inks, as far as I know, are not made out of polyester. Though somewhere along the way I have seen a video where a guy screen printed some goop on a shirt then seemed to do a (maybe) sublimation transfer over that ... was a while ago, and he was being vague.

Anyway, sure, can be done one way or another. But after you have succeeded in getting a thick opaque rectangle of white polyester goop down on your black shirt and have sublimated an image to it, is it a unicorn or an old nag with a paper cone? You might have succeeded in creating a colorful version of a bullet proof vest, or maybe no worse than a decently printed full-chest Plastisol print, but certainly not a zero-hand sublimation print. Is the polyester-laced goo as durable as Plastisol? Hell, maybe it would even work on regular Plastisol to some extent, don't know. I'm sure someone will chime in with an experiment they have done, or seen done. I don't know what the guy used that I described above, as he was being cagey about the process, but still feeling the need to show off.

I've been messing about with my own cone-headed nag. Discharge print a white rectangle and then heat press a JPSS transfer over it. Of course, got to wash that nasty discharge stuff out first, and need to allow a bit of slop so the transfer overlaps onto the colored part of the garment. Again, the end result is not a zero hand print, but a JPSS transfer, which especially at first feels like what it is, a piece of plastic stuck to the shirt (the feel improves with a few washings, but is still not zero hand).

In my case, my cone-headed nag is good enough for my purposes. I discharge print garments with white rectangles in bulk, then print and press the transfers as needed for orders. So a half-butted way to POD full-color art on dark garments. Oh, and I'm printing the JPSS with sublimation ink, though it is intended for use with pigment inks. I'm not doing that because of the miracle of sublimation, but because due to the covid supply chain catastrophe, I had to convert my 13x19 printer to sublimation, so no longer have a pigment printer large enough to do shirt transfers. I've been told that using sublimation inks with these transfers is inadvisable, but it seems to be working out okay so far.

But, again, no particular reason to use sublimation unless it is the only printer you have access to, since one is negating all the special attributes of sublimation (zero hand, extreme durability) by taping a paper cone to a nag in the first place. That nice, nice sublimation ink will only be as "magical" as whatever trick you use to get it to show up on a black shirt, and only that durable, and only that nice feeling.

So what is your specific use case?


EDIT Ha! I remembered that we have these fancy new emoticons ... 🦄
 
#3 ·
If you search for "all over sublimation" you'll find one way of doing it. Basically you make a print bigger than a white shirt and then sublimate onto it as usual but using a very large heatpress. If you do the front and the back then it can look like a black shirt. I guess the inside is still white though.
 
#12 ·
If I want to do sublimation on a black shirt, can I use screen printing to create a white under base and then sublimate on top of it?
It is possible but you will need 2 screens.
One to screen-print the discharge base and one for the polymer coating.
Personally, I don't like the way it looks on black t-shirts, but you can get decent results on lighter colors.
 
#13 ·
Bottom line is, you can't. At least not with a cost-effect, quality product as the end result. There are many decorating methods for many different applications and it's advisable to choose the proper method for your blank. There's no such thing as white sublimation ink, and the CMYK inks are translucent so it becomes an additive color of the substrate. If you apply vinyl or any other coating on top of the garment and then sublimate on top of that, you don't have a sublimated shirt; at least not by the definition of sublimation. So if you can't get a no-hand, high quality end product, then why bother. There are other options, just not sublimation. Too many people trying to spend $100 to make a $10 product.
 
#14 ·
I did see a video where they used bleach to whiten the shirt, peroxide to neutralize the bleach, then dyesub’d it. It would only work if you knew the shirt was manufactured with white fabric then dyed black. But many shirts are born gray then dyed darker.

As clumsy as I am, I don’t need all those fluids making a swamp on my workbench, then laying out garments everywhere to dry, it’s just not worth it in my mind.
But…
What if you did a forever white print base then dyesub on top? Alignment would be an issue to be sure. Soft hand I would think. Anyone try that?
 
#15 ·
That process uses a 65% Cotton / 35% Polyester shirt; as bleach only works on cotton. Once bleached, the 35% polyester will take the sub ink but the final product is heavily stressed. Also, those shirts don't last long because the bleach weakens the cotton fibers. It's simply an inferior product and not a true sublimation process. Is is a decorating process? Sure, I guess. But it's not really sublimation.

And "soft hand" is not the same as "no hand". And sublimation on top of Forever White tends to fade prematurely.
 
#19 ·
Hi. There is no unsolvable problem. Press a water-based barrier layer. Let the silk number be 55.
 
#24 ·
Yeah, good intro to the key points and various approaches.

Though if she washed those "sublimated after bleaching" shirts, I think she'd find that they were just about as faded as the others, as the cotton content retains some sublimation ink until it is washed. The prints I did on 60% cotton, 40% poly heathers looked fantastic! ... until I washed them :p With that low of a poly content (as opposed to about the opposite numbers for those Gildans), only black art comes through strong enough to be of much use.
 
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