DIY Screen Printing... so far

This is probably going to be my exciting thing for the summer and it is SO HOT right now! I've been working on some designs as far back as April. Most of them were initially hand drawn, scanned, vectorized, and cleaned up using Sketch. Then I started to investigate the whole screen burning process. There are lots of great YouTube videos and a number of different approaches to building screens, coating them with emulsion, exposing them with the design, and then finally getting some ink on shirts.

I took a pile of thrift store frames and stripped them down to the wood. I heard that some screen frames made from wood like to warp. I had some clear coat laying around so I added some to the frames for good measure.

I bopped out to Jo-Anns and bought some sheer voile curtain fabric. I cut pieces large enough to wrap all the way around the edges. The stapler worked, but the staples wouldn't go in all the way. Maybe the wood was too hard? Overall I'm not very happy with the end result of stretching and stapling my own screens. I plan to try using an aluminum pre-made screen and see what the quality difference is. 

I took my vector images and converted them to PDF format so that they would get printed exactly the size I wanted them to be. I ordered transparencies through Staples online and later that day I picked them up. The two dragons are actually going to go on the same t-shirt, but keeping them separate should make it easier to adjust the layout for different sized shirts. The larger "Howdy Howdy Shark" design is actually two separate transparencies. I was laying them on top to make sure that the designs weren't too big for the frames. You should try to have about an inch or more between the edge of the design and the inside of the frame. 

Then I smeared some activated Speedball Diazo Photo Emulsion on one of my screens. I was trying to get it on there with a nice consistent coating... but I missed some spots. I let it dry overnight in a dark dresser drawer. The next day I used clear scotch tape to attach my transparency to the prepared screen. There is a way to do this backwards... so be careful. I'll really have to go into more detail in another post and actually take pictures. Anyways, burning the screen was easier than I thought it would be because it changed color for me. 

I picked up a starter set of Speedball Opaque Fabric Ink. If you like to print on dark fabrics you must be careful not to buy the wrong type of ink. 

I let the screen dry a little more after burning and rinsing, but it wasn't but a couple hours later I was trying it out. I did the blue shirt first and I wasn't very happy with some of the detail... especially around the eyes. I had some brown scraps of denim/canvas around and my first go at that turned out crisper than the second one. Clearly I have some more practicing to do there, but I like the start!