Species (T-shirt Design and Printing)

Remember that little .gif image almost a month ago, revealing a snippet of a sneak peak. Well it’s finally done. Sorry i havent posted even updates but i wanted it to be a surprise.

I have been working on a design for my friends and their band “Species”. Planning on creating shirts with said design. But i wanted to give my shot at printing the shirts myself. Otherwise they couldnt afford it anyway. But even so, i wanted to get into the act of screen printing the shirts.

Heres the initial design on the lefttop. Created in Photoshop Cs 6. On the bottom is the image inverted along with some layers i cut from the initial design and pasted it to overlap the same part of the design on the bottom. For example the Logo, and the babies. Notice how they are identical.

Next i set up “my studio” and got the supplies i needed. The reason i had the above design inverted but adjusted is so it would look better on the black shirt. In the process you need to print out your design to a transparency sheet. If you have a laser printer get the laser printer kind, if you have an inkjet get an inkjet kind. (This is actually important, believe it or not).

If you know the process thats awesome! Cause i didnt get detailed pictures of the products you will need, but i can tell you that you need:

• Photo Emulsion
• Diazo Sensitizer
• Silk Screen
• Clean up towels
• Squeegee
• 150 watt light bulb
• Fabric Ink

After printing your design onto the transparency youll need to paint your silk screen with the photo emulsion paint. This first needs to be sensitized with the diazo sensitizer solution so it can be exposed to light and work correctly.  After mixing the diazo with the emulsion, wait 2 hours at least for the bubbles to be out of the jar. Then squeegee the emulsion to the screen.  Make sure when put away to dry it is now in a LIGHT SAFE envirenmont.

After letting the screen dry for about 8 hours to be safe, Remove it and place it like so with your transparency reversed on the top. Put your 150 watt bulb above your design to let the image burn into the screen.

Now im not  going to much into detail right now and if you have questions please Ask me Or look at a better guide for directions because there are a lot of things im not covering that kinda need to be said. Hence why the first few times i tried this i miserably failed. By the way dont get emulsion “sheets” just get the paint.

Eventually after enough trial and error the screen was made correctly after washing off the image where it had burned. Then you place it on a shirt and…

WHAMMO! My project for the last month and a half! Im really proud of this. Mostly because ive never done shirts before, i really like the design, and the band i did it for are all really good friends of mine! Excited to sell them at their concert Thursday. They are opening for the all holy TesseracT!!!  If you live in kansas or are from lawrence kansas, i encourage you to stop by the granada at 5 30.