DIY Screen Printing How To Instructional Video from the DIY Print Shop

hey guys how's it going i'm ryan for my annette and welcome to this DIY screen-printing tutorial now our goal miss tutorial is not just to show you how to screen print but it's to inspire you to create Ryan and print libération got together to create these kits just for you we start a screen printing completely on our own and completely DIY we didn't have all the cool things that come in the kit and we didn't have any instruction but we learn in kitchens and garages just like you're going to learn in this tutorial we turn screen printing into two very successful businesses so what are you gonna do is screen printing let's get started by showing you how screen printing works and how to use your kit and from there the sky's your limit you can do anything that you want through screen printing and the screen is your canvas so let's get started all of our DIY kits include all the screen printing supplies you need to start a screen printing there are a few household items you need to add to the list so let's show you what you need now half-inch or crescent wrench power drill or screw gun light fixture or desk lamp tape measure or t-square sharpie or opaque black marker iron or heat gun for curing black trash bags heavy duty paper towels scotch tape rubber gloves and of course a t-shirt let's start by putting together your screen printing press so we're going to start with a hinge kit you're gonna want to take out your DIY hinges and your DIY hinge screws your DIY hinge easily comes apart your male end attaches to the table your female end we're going to want to put on the screen we're going to use the two male ends as a spacer so we're going to set them underneath the frame like that now we'll apply a female end we'll put it up to the edge of the frame like so and then what you're going to want to do is on the knotch so your wood frame will come over it will have a notch right here this is where you're going to want to Center or place the female part of the hinge so simply place it and screw it in next put the male part back in and then line that to where you want on a table and screw the other two down now keep in mind you can always move this but you are making screw holes in wherever you're replacing your hinge screen so once it's on it can easily come off and move now let's show you how to set up the DOI presses we're going to show you on the one color press the pork color press works pretty much the same way let's start with a screen clamp take your clamp brackets your off contact adjustments you want to put them with the large side of the inside of the bracket facing down at the bottom of the clamp and the large side facing on the inside of the clamp like so so they're gonna both going to go opposite like that I typically set them to the midpoint put our washers on and then put our nuts on and actually just hand tighten them down because we can make the fine adjustments later now let's put our screen clamp on the print arm we're gonna start by putting the top bolt of the clamp in and that does not have a spacer so just take the top bolt put the nut on the outside and then once again just hand tighten that now let's put the spacer in the bottom bolt then kind of slightly squeeze that give it some pressure and if you can't do it by hand simply tighten the top bolt down a little bit then slide in the top bolt through that spacer should slide it in like that put the nut the washer on and then put the nut on right there like so and once again hand tighten now let's put our shock on so you take your shock receiver and apply it to the ball and to put it on just put a little bit of pressure on the ball and pop it will go in you ever need to take it off the shock has a little spring that you'll need to get underneath it with a screwdriver or hinge pop that spring off and then it will come off the ball now let's put our platen on we have four platen screws and the platen should be pre-drilled to fit the DIY press we're gonna take the press we're going to flip it upside down put the platen on the edge the table hold it with one hand while we put a screw in or take the screw in the screw gun and then we'll simply start it by just screwing one of those screws in to give ourselves a nice base and then make sure all the other holes align and simply put the rest of the screws in our press is now together you notice that it will actually be pretty hard to press down without a screen in it so don't be afraid if it feels pretty stiff up here now we're actually going to attach it to a table or a bench to attach to a table or bench I like to keep it roughly waist high so if you see here it's just a little bit lower than my waist you don't want really really high screen printing service area so I'm gonna take it I'm going to make sure that the pallet actually sits off the table so if you see what I'm doing out here the pallets sitting off the table maybe three or four inches and then I'll attach it to this particular press cart which you can use a tabletop you can use an old bench anything that you really want to screw your straight printing press to but it really needs to be solid if you're doing this in your kitchen you want to make sure that you're going to be using some other type of big piece of wood that you can attach the press to and then put some weight on it or maybe some clamps and put it towards that kitchen counter so it doesn't move around so once again one time I'm about four inches or so off for five inches there's no super-science on that you want to be able to then screw this and secure it down to that tabletop surface as an upgrade to the DIY press you can add these pallet brackets which are super handy and giving your pallets extra extension or swapping different sizes of pallets on your screen printing press alright so our screen printing shops now set up so let's move on to making screens the way the exposure process works is we have an unexposed screen that when exposed to light hardens we take our film positive we put it up to the unexposed screen in reverse order then we expose it with light so now let's say the screen is exposing the area of the film that is blocking out the light from reaching on the screen or the emotion behind it is leaving it unexposed that unexposed part when you take the film off can be washed off of water so the goal of this film is to block out light meaning has to be very dark and opaque because this film has to be very opaque we want to make sure that we use the right settings on our inkjet printer to print it this is inkjet waterproof film so will not work on a laser printer it works best on an inkjet printer it has two sides to it it has an inkjet receptive side which is slightly sticky and it has the plastic carrier side you can easily tell by licking your finger and the side that the finger sticks to is inkjet receptive side so now let's talk about the best settings you can use on your photo printer the best settings you can use an HF printer is going to be best quality photo and then your paper settings going to be something like premium glossy photo paper or premium glossy or glossy photo paper these settings will lay down the most ink on your film give you the optimal dense and dark film for screen exposure now because this is a film positive if you're designing it on the computer printer you want to design a black image or black text on a white background then you're going to want to print it using those photo settings that we just told you about any black image your artwork where do we actually got this squeegee art directly from the DIY print shop site we have a bunch of free DIY art if you notice the art that we're doing is simple text and simple clipart and it's all solid you don't want to start out using gradients you always want to start out DIY screen printing using solid images like we see here you can get into gradient printing with half-tones as you advance in screen printing you can also use a sharpie or an opaque pen to actually draw and create your own film so let's say we wanted to draw or enhance this explanation mark right here we could do so with this sharpie you want to make sure that you have opaque film or very very opaque pen to do that with and you want to make sure that you use the inkjet receptive side as well to do that the final thing that you're going to want to put on your film is a centerline now this centerline was actually printed on the film if you didn't put the centerline on your film in the artwork program it's very easy to do after the fact you simply actually take your film you fold it in half and they put a little tiny crease at the top and at the bottom of your film now all you do is come and take your Sharpie or a peg pin and put a little dot at the top and the bottom of your film and now as you see here our film has a centerline you want to make sure that you do this after your film is printed because the crease film can feed fairly difficult ly through named jet printer once we have our film we can now go to make our screen we'll take our screen and we'll take it off the hinges simply by sliding it to the left or to the right depending on how your hinges are setup comes off these hinges are watertight so that you don't have to worry about getting water in them and then it can easily slide back on pretty cool little setup really now you have your screen it's time to prep your screen by the greasing the screen we're going to take that over to the sink and use our DIY screen degreaser in order to do that first we take our screen degreaser and we fill it the rest of the way up with water and then we put our cap on it now this is a drain safe product eco-friendly screen degreaser and you don't have to worry about putting it down the drain unless you're putting other stuff down with it definitely read the instructions carefully to make sure that you're doing things right once it's filled up we're going to take our screen put it in the sink and we're going to spray a little bit on the screen as we get the screen wet so we'll get our screen wet like that and then we'll spray a little bit on the screen just a few squirts it doesn't take a lot now what this actually does is this actually cleans all the impurities off the screen mesh so that our image will stick to it so we'll take our brush and we'll just simply scrub in the degreaser like so we want to make sure that we're doing this in a clean sink so that we do not have dirty you know food and stuff or a dirty grease getting in we also want to make sure that we scrub off not only just the screen but we scrub off the frame as well so that we can clean the impurities off the frame the hinges everything's nice and clean so once it's all scrubbed down sized up we're going to go ahead and rinse it out well just rinse it we'll make sure to rinse it goods to get all the suds off of it and once again we want to make sure that we're doing this in a sink that is not dirty if it is dirty you want to lift up the screen just a little bit to clean it off you know you can use lukewarm water you don't want to use super hot water and you can use cold water too but warm water does clean a little bit faster once again just don't get it scalding hot so once it's all cleaned we're good to go so now we can actually just tap this off for money like that or we can just let this dry and fund in front of a cleaning fan if you let it dry outside or if you let it dry in front of a dirty fan you can blow you know junk you know dust and dirt back into the screen basically defeating accomplish a degree in which we just did so you want to make sure we let this dry in a clean area the next step of the screen printing process involves emulsion and emulsion exposes your screen and puts your image on it because it exposes it needs to be handled in a light safe environment until after it's exposed to create a life saving environment we've included a light safe yellow bulb in your DIY kit this light safe yellow bulb does not put out any UV rays UV rays come in from the window they can come in from standard lights but this is light safe now because we want to create a lifes environment if we have a window like this you want to make sure that we put a shade over it what we're going to be doing is simply taking a black trash bag and putting it up over the window to block out any of the light from actually coming in and simply just come up here and put some tape on there or something like that to block out the light we took our lights a kalabaw we put in a desk lamp or light fixture and then we have no light coming in the outside now we have a light safe environment now that we're in a life saving environment it's time to prepare our screen for exposure start we're gonna mix our emulsion in your kit you got a pint of dual cure emulsion meaning it has an activator that actually makes it light-sensitive so when we open up the emulsion we can actually open it up in light right now it's not light-sensitive but the moment we mix the activator in it becomes light-sensitive and then when you always want to handle it in a light safe environment start by open up your emulsion and taking the residue that's on the cap and then scraping it in using your emulsion stirring stick so scrape it in there like so next we're going to add distilled water 50% or half way into the emulsion dye as Oh which activates the emulsion so use like a water bottle or some type of water that's distilled to actually mix this up halfway once you have your water halfway put the cap back on and then shake that aggressively to mix it on and all the dyes are in the water together now that we have our dye as oh solution we're going to take this and we're going to dump that into the emulsion to activate it now that's dumped in we simply take our stir stick and we stir it all the way until it is uniform in color and consistent I typically recommend leaving it sit with a lid capped a little bit open to allow the air bubbles to evaporate or work its way out of the mixed and molding now also once again your mold is a dual carrier motion so it has a shelf life meaning that once we mix this all the way it will last for about three months I typically like to date my emotion when I mix it so that I know when it's about ready to expire and I can order more you can keep this emulsion for a little bit longer if you store it in the fridge however never ever never let this emulsion freeze if it freezes it will immediately go bad and you won't be able to use it again once your emulsion is uniform in color like we see here we're going to clean off applicator stick and to put on the lid and leave it tilted just slightly open now I do recommend letting this sit for an hour so to let those air bubbles kind of work their way out now emulsion will stain so if you get it on your countertops you want to clean it right away with some soap and warm water it cleans right up with some soap and warm water however if you let it stain it will stain that dye as it leaves a kind of an iodine yellow stain but we'll clean up right away so as long as you clean it up right away you're good okay our mold is mixed we've allowed the air bubbles to kind of work their way out for a little bit our screen is dry and now it's time to coat the screen with the emulsion and prepare it for exposure to coat the screen we're gonna use a tool that came in our kit called a scoop coder this one's black some of them are silver depending on the type of kit that you bought we're gonna use a clean rag to make sure that there's no dust or dirt in that scoop coder you can even use a little bit of degreaser to be on the safe side once that's all clean ready to go we're going to fill it up with emulsion so we'll now take our molding and we'll put maybe a quarter of emulsion and this depends on how many screens you're actually doing but you can fill it up maybe a quarter of the way a third of the way or even half the way if you're doing a lot of screens but right now we're just putting and doing it a quarter of the way we'll fill it up a quarter of the way with emulsion and then you always want to make sure to have a rag handy because this gets a little goopy as you see there so we're just gonna wipe that down and then set that into a safe spot once that's ready we're just going to put the cap back on a little bit like that once again set it to the corner like that there are a few different ways to coat your screen with emulsion the key is to get even and sharp coat you're going to use the sharp side of your scoop coder you're going to notice that there's a round side for a thicker coat which are for more advanced screen printing applications and a sharp side where you use the sharp side also you want to make sure that you coat both sides of the screen to create a very strong stencil or image we're gonna start on the flat side or the shirt side of the screen and we're going to finish on the squeegee side or the ink side of the screen to coat your screen hold your multiple scoop cutter with one hand I like to place my screen on the edge of a table or the edge of countertop like this to kind of hold it in place if you're in a light safe environment where your hinges are at you can even use your hinges to set your screen back in place so once we're ready to coat you want to take your scoop coder and put it about maybe a quarter inch from the bottom of your frame you tilt your screen back a little bit like so and you tilt your scoop coder back like that to allow the emulsion to actually work its way onto the screen mesh we want that emulsion to really dam up against the screen mesh so we're looking for something like that that emulsion is damming up against the mesh we're going to move the scoop coder from the bottom to the top like so about a quarter inch from the top we're going to stop and let that emulsion kind of sawed off so that we leave the top of the screen clean if you have areas of this screen that have a little bit of emulsion drips you can take that damp or wet rag or towel and simply wipe those off to keep the screen nice and clean on the top and the bottom you want to be careful however not to use too wet of rigs you don't want water dripping into the center of your screen there's a very specific sound that you're looking for when you're coding a stream is it zip sound you want to use a good amount of pressure if you don't use enough pressure your Morgan's going to spill all over the screen I'll demonstrate that now so here's an example of not using enough pressure and your motion is kind of spilling all over the place if we use a good amount of pressure we're gonna let that emulsion dam up move it back a little bit about a 45 degree angle or 75 degree angle there and then zip up and you hear that zip about a quarter inch from the top you kind of saw it off leaving a nice smooth coat screen we're gonna do the same exact thing on the inside of the screen so we're going to flip the screen upside down to coat the other side then we're gonna use the hinges and then kind of the counter top right here we'll take the scoop coder dip it in and then let it dam against the emulsion against the mesh and then zip up about 1/4 inch from the top we're gonna saw it off and now we're done when you're done coding you're looking for a nice smooth and glossy surface on your frame not too much emulsion too much emulsion will make it hard to expose if you feel you have too much emulsion go ahead and coat again but instead of applying emulsion simply just take your scoop coder and act like you've already applied the emulsion onto the frame and kind of do a clean wipe like this and that will take the extra motion off the frame what you're looking for once again is a nice thin coat here's a few tips for coating your screens if you can get down with one hand try two hands you can take a 2x4 or some type of wood to put it I go up against the frame and then let's say set the screen up against the side of a counter or the wall with a 2x4 behind it this keeps it nice and stable and allows you to use two hands which controls the scoop coder a little easier once our screens coated we're gonna let it dry to let it dry we're gonna let it sit face down and let it dry so gravity pulls the emulsion is stencil to the outside of the frame we're going to take just two pieces of kitchen items right there or you can use pieces of wood which work really good and set them on the frame itself on either side so I'm gonna set one on this side and one on this side and this allows the screen to dry in a downwards position to let it dry quicker what you can do is put a fan once again make sure you have a clean environment here to make sure that there's no dust blowing into your nicely coated screen so let it dry like this if you don't have a fan it's gonna take quite a while so we recommend using a fan keep in mind we've been doing this including the drying process in a light safe environment letting your screen drive is very important needs to be all the way dry so Nizar dry in a very dry environment if you're too humid it won't dry very well so if you're human you might need to get a dehumidifier however if you're in a fairly dry environment if you put a fan on it it should dry in about three to four hours if you're not using a fans gonna take like a day to dry and if you're in human environment and may not dry at all so a very dry environment is important and then airflow is important making sure that airflow is nice and clean you're not blowing dirt back up in your screen all right once we're done coating the screen we're going to take it the rest of our emulsion and simply dump it back into the molding container I'm using a glove to kind of scrape that emulsion backing you can also use some of those cleanup cards that you got in your kit to do that once most of its back in we do need to clean the scoop coder we do not let one let this emulsion dry in the scoop coder so you want to do this as soon as you're done this once it's all back in like that you clean off your hand nice and good and then cap that emulsion sure it's nice and tight now to save our sink because we're doing this in a nice clean sink what we're actually going to do is we're actually going to take a piece of trash bag so we cut a trash bag in half we're going to put it in the sink and it cut a hole in the bottom of it to allow the water to drain down but it's not going to get the sink full of emulsion because that dazzle does stain fairly quickly so now we'll simply take this and well do all our cleaning and wash out like this as well so if you're using a home environment like a sink or a bathtub definitely recommend protecting that because this stuff will stain fairly quickly so I'm washing this out with warm water goes very quickly you can even take a rag kind of scrub on it and it cleans up pretty nice and easy just with some warm water making sure to protect the environment that we're washing out in once our coders all the way washed out we want to let it dry these are critical edges meaning you want to keep them sharp so when we ever let it dry or reset it we're going to keep it set face-up we never want to set it on the ground like that that will actually could wreck our edge so you definitely want to make sure that those edges are protected you can tell your stencil or emulsion is dry if you rub it your fingers don't stick to it if you lick your finger and it doesn't stick to it but if it sticks to it really really bad it probably needs to dry a little bit more so if you feel moisture in that make sure you get into a drier environment or you let it dry for longer once our screen is dry it's now time to expose our screen now keep in mind if you want to pre-cut your screens you can do that that's okay however you want to make sure that you store them in a light safe environment everything right now is done in that light safe environment so a good way to store your screens in a light safe environment is by taking that black trash bag put in an inside the black trash bag and then storing them in that black trash bag you can store these pre coated screens for two to four weeks before you go to expose them on to press to expose the screen we're going to take our film we're going to line that to the center of the screen now if we're doing a two-color job three color job or four color job the alignment is much more important than if we're doing just a one color job if we're doing those multiple color jobs we want to actually get our t-square and ruler out to make sure that this line this film is aligned in the same spot on each frame however for one color job we're simply going to line the film to roughly the center of the screen now we're going to line the film in the reverse order we're going to take the film upside down we're going to put that through the flat part of the screen or your shirt side that means that on the inside of the screen you can actually see your image the correct way that it would show up on a t-shirt once it's in the approximate center of the frame we're going to take some scotch tape and tape that down once our screen is taped down all the way if we want to we can actually take a piece of very clear glass that fits the inside of your mesh and put that over that now this would be an aftermarket item you can pick up at Lowe's or Home Depot or a glass shop and we'll give your film some more positive pressure what's important in screen printing is positive pressure to get really fine detail and foremost your DIY designs we're going to be okay with just taping it however for more fine detail if you take a piece of glass and put that over or if you invest in an exposure system later that allows you to create that positive pressure pushing your film to your screen mesh and getting a nice fine image now that our film is aligned we're going to expose the screen to do that we're going to take our exposure ball that we got in our kit we're going to put it in a desk lamp or a light fixture like this this is going to turn it on so this is on now we don't want to turn it on until we're I'm ready to expose the screen what we're gonna do is we're going to take this we're going to put it about a foot maybe 14 inches above the frame so I'm just gonna hang it right here from this cupboard and then I want to make sure that this is evenly placed over the center of my screen once again this is done in a light safe environment so it's right over the center about a foot above it it's holding tight and then I'm going to plug it in when I plug it in it exposes for nine or ten minutes so you want to make sure that you're plugging it in and starting a stopwatch or a timer or something to make sure that you're exposing that range so once again 12 inches 14 inches above and then put your screen in the center of that and then plug it in and start the timer for nine minutes all right nine minutes is up so time to unplug and wash your screen out now that our screen is exposed we're going to take the film positive off of it in your life safe environment you should be able to still see your image exposed on the screen so right there we can see our image slightly exposed to the screen that's what we're looking for so if your screen was not properly coated with emulsion or if your film wasn't dark enough or you didn't expose long enough you won't see that image you want to make sure you'd be able to see that image your motion starts to go bad as you get it sold you won't see the image expose on to it so you need more emulsion or new emulsion so now that our screen is expose we're going to take that put that into the sink and we're going to get it wet on both sides using lukewarm water and what we're doing right here is called developing the screen so we're just loosening that image area up and developing it yeah we'll let that sit for about a minute and then come and spray it out when you're washing the screen out I recommend washing it out from the light side of the screen once it's have been allowed to soak or develop for about a minute now the more pressure you washed out with the better using a soft amount of pressure doesn't come clean very easily so right now we're just using if we use just a little bit of pressure right there starts to washed out not too bad but if we use more pressure see washes out much faster so the more pressure you can use here the better if you have like a strong shower nozzle or a stronger nozzle like outside it would work very very good now keep in mind we're still doing this in the light safe environment meaning that if we go and try to wash this out in direct sunlight it's not very good so it gets wet first you develop it in the light safe environment you can go wash it outside that will work okay but for the most part keep it in the shade so we're looking to clean all that emulsion out of our stencil so this is washing nicely one thing to keep in mind is we do not want this screen to get too wet if it gets too wet it starts to wrinkle up on the edges and it will start to essentially not wash out at all and or your design starts to wash away so we want to be careful not to get that screen too wet if your emulsion is a little hard to wash out what you can do is you can take your hand and kind of scrub at that part that may be that part got a little bit thicker coat of emulsion down there towards the bottom or towards the top kind of scrub it a little bit kind of agitate that emulsion up a little bit once your screens all the way washed out we want to tap all the water out of it and then let it dry a great way to let it dry is putting it in the Sun also you can let it dry by taking it putting it underneath your exposure light and then putting the exposure lamp back on it like so that'll allow to dry very nicely that light kind of bakes in the screen making it harder and lasts longer once our screens exposed and all dry it's time to wrap up the light safe so we can take off the shades time to start sprinting all right now it's time to make that magic happen and screen print our first shirt using the hinge kit what we're going to do is we're going to take our screen and we're going to put it back into the hinges slide it back into place there and before we start screen for any we're going to tape the edges of our screen off so we're going to grab the DIY tape that came in your kit and we're going to cut it to fit the frame so on the inside of the frame we're applying this tape so that the ink does not work its way around the edge of the screen so we put about half of it on the inside of the mesh and then we take our finger we kind of give it a seam against the wood frame and then we apply it to the edge we want to do that around each way we can either just use a scissors right there or like a tape dispenser to cut it cut it off like that and once again we want to see the edge making sure we're getting a smooth good adhesion along each side of the frame and the mesh once your screens all the way taped down you want to look through your screen to see if you see any parts that need to be taped off from the other side now this would be example this would be your Center marks you don't want your Center Mars to print on your shirt so we're gonna take our screen put it in the up and go like that and then on this particular screen we're going to put a piece of tape on the outside of our mesh over our Center mark there so if you see any pinholes or dust specks or anything in there you want to make sure that you tape those off from the other side the ink side you tape off on the inside make sure it's nice and seams so now let's align our shirt and print our first shirt with this DIY kit see if you notice here this mesh has a little bit of what we call off contact now that off contact actually allows that screen to balance and lay ink onto the shirt but it has too much off contact what we're going to do is we're going to put a spacer like that piece of cardboard we actually cut a piece of the DIY kit off from the inside you can also use like Plexiglas or piece of melamine maybe a quarter inch would be a good piece where to put that underneath the kit to give us a little bit of distance right there so it's got to fit our image area which it does now if you're doing a multiple color image what you want to do is you actually want to take this spacer and put it inside your shirt so that your shirt stays consistently in the same spot so if you're going to try to print that again that would be important or if you're doing white ink on a black shirt that would be important as well so to do that with the hinge kit what we're going to do is we're going to take our glue and we're going to cut a little hole in the top now this works much better on melanin or like plexi than it does cardboard cardboard doesn't obviously on here glue nearly the same as a hard surface would but we just put a little bit on there kind of spread it out to give us a sticky surface to insert on the shirt so kind of good that sticky surface all around there so that shirt has somewhere to live now we're going to print on the front of this shirt so we're gonna take this and we're going to stick it inside the shirt like so to open up the shirt and stick it inside the shirt now it's important to get the shirts square and to get our Center square so that's a little skinny center right there we can probably do a little bit better job of centering this out if we had a little bit bigger piece to put in it but right here we're just going to stick that in there like so you can lift the shirt up like that and then kind of line that there in the center you can even create little drawings or marks on your pallet to make sure that everything aligns the correct way and if you notice that sticks the shirt really nice right there you can also simply take a shirt and set it on top of this little piece of wood cardboard or Melanie basically this adhesive wegg makes that surface a little bit more stable when you're printing on it from there you're gonna want to take the shirt collar and Center them between the two hinges so you're gonna take the two hinges and Center them out then you're going to want to lift the shirt or screen down over the shirt now typical edge image placement from the bottom of your Center tee right here is about three fingers or three inches or so so right now this shirt is too low because when the screen comes down I can actually see the collar through the design so I'm gonna lift this up because it's already Center and I'm gonna simply push it up a little bit so I'm gonna push this up keeping it Center to the center and I'm going to kind of tuck that down underneath there so now we're gonna we're gonna measure it out so get it nice and center there it's right there it's about three fingers down or above our surface area everything looks good and we're ready to print to plot ink to the screen take one of your ink cards just dip it in there like that and then outside the screen mesh they're not in the open area so near the edge of the frame that keep - is a relatively large image you want to apply a decent amount of ink there so enough ink to coat the whole screen consistently so this is using the green galaxy pitch back ink if you get a little in the image area that's okay we're just going to take that card and kind of set this aside it was really hot in your environment this is a water-based ink so you want to make sure to cap that but we're okay in this environment now we're going to actually flood the screen up so we're going to apply ink over the image area like that and then we're going to print it so we're gonna hold the screen down with our left hand and then we're gonna print it with our right hand so notice my angle right there I have a lot of ink on my screen or my squeegee I lift that up my angle is about a 75 degree angle or so I'm gonna flood that again and then print with it one more time so with it probably twice I'm looking through my mesh to make sure that I'm getting all the ink kind of pushed through the screen mesh now when you're using this hinge kit in this manner we take the typically recommend you stick with the colored inks and light garments or lighter garments like black ink red ink the Y thinks gonna be a lot more difficult to print you can do it but it is much easier to print white ink on a press which we'll explain in a second so we've got two passes we look to make sure that our screen is all the way you know flooded with ink we've got all the ink through if there needs to be different parts we can come over here and once again holding it down if you're got enough pressure we can use both both hands like that and that does look work a little bit easier when using both hands but make sure that your frame is all the way down and stable which that was and we probably didn't need to use that one hand it is much easier to use both hands when you're pulling it so we pulled it we've taken the ink out so now you need a place to set your squeegee so you can either take your ink and kind of dab it up on the top there again to allow it to rest up and then set your squeegee to the side careful not to dribble it too much and then simply lift up now we're gonna take out the sticky part careful here because we do have wet ink and here is our first screen print all right do-it-yourself screen printer so we did this all using the hinge kit everything looks good looks nice and centered there so now let's go to cure this ink and then we'll actually use the screen printing press to show you how much easier it is to use the press but you can pretty sure it fairly easily using a hinge kit as well if you're going to be doing more than one shirt it's very important to leave your screen flooded with ink so you want to take your ink and you want to kind of flood it up even that image area floated with ink you don't want to press too hard you kind of just let that squeegee float across the top you set the squeegee aside put a paper towel down now you don't want to let this drop now so take a piece of tape take your tape roll or something to kind of let that sit in the upward position this will make the screen mesh continue to stay wet while you're waiting to put another shirt on it if you leave this screen much open this the water-based ink so it could dry in the mesh and you have to take some water and kind of mist it out or scrub it out in order to get that mesh unstuck with ink so keep it flooded and you'll be okay once we've printed our shirts now it's time to cure our design now this is a very important part of screen printing because if the ink doesn't cure and won't stay on the shirt it may feel dry but it has to cure the temperature the ink cures that is 320 degrees so a hot iron will do the trick also a heat gun or optimally a flash dryer I've even heard some people using oven one Singh is 320 degrees in your kit you've got this silicone coated Teflon paper so basically this will protect the shirt against the iron so I put it over part of the design and I take the iron on the hot hot hot setting and I kind of go over each part of the designer so for about you know 90 seconds to two minutes allowing that ink to settle in and rest in so we're curing the ink there about 90 seconds to two minutes over each part the longer you cure the better obviously you don't want to scorch your garment but this paper should protect your garment good enough so we're doing half of the design at once doing that top part and then moving our way down curing the whole design once we've gone forth a lot amount of time once again 90 seconds to two minutes we want to feel that now a couple ways to test you get your finger wet and you can kind of scrub that a little bit if ink starts to come off on your finger that means that's not cured all the way you can take a white rag and do the same thing and that definitely is a good way to test if it's cured all the way so right here this is not here thinks going to come up on my finger but right here this is cured really good up here and it does not come up on my finger at all so now let's cure the bottom part of the design but to do that we're going to use something a little bit different we're going to use a heat gun to do that we're using a very very hot heat gun this gets to like 700 degrees Fahrenheit so this does a pretty good job of curing but you do need to be careful with this not just scorch your shirt or whatever's underneath your so I lift the shirt up a little bit like this and I kind of go over each section for about 30 seconds to a minute making sure that it's curing out all the way and if your inks really wet you can actually see your ink kind of dry underneath the heat gun so it does a good job of you know kind of blowing that water out of the water-based ink this is water-based ink it's completely eco-friendly it's very safe now it's very easy to use very easy to clean up but all that water has to evaporate out of it before it'll here so that's why using this forced hot air does do a pretty good job of curing so now we're cured all the way up there move to the bottom part of the design and then going over each section for about 30 seconds to a minute with this forced very very hot air you're going to see water kind of steam out that doesn't mean the shirts on fire that's just the steam coming out of ink this is a little more tricky than the iron because if we miss a section like if I cure this section and on this section in that middle section is missed that middle section is going to wash out so once again curing the egg very very important part of screen for you take your time now let's test it we're gonna rub of our finger against there definitely no meat coming off here the same thing on top yeah we're good there's this designs nice and cure one was using the iron one was using the heat gun either way works just you want to make sure the iron takes a little bit longer but it does cover a little bit bigger surface area now if you have a heat press you can also use a heat press 320 degrees for 90 seconds using a Teflon coated piece of paper or something like that here we have a flash dryer which does do a final cure of your shirt and it's traditionally used in screen printing to flash between colors so if you have a white underbase with a red over print or something like that right now I can put this about four inches above my shirt rotate the flash dryer over the shirt and allow that to cure the shirt as long as it's got air underneath it or does not stuck to a pallet or something like that like here's the shirt in about 90 seconds to two minutes but it does the entire shirt at once so it's a lot quicker you can also be used in other things in screen printing especially if you're using your for color DIY screen press now we're going to print another shirt not putting that inner lining in the shirt so it goes a little bit quicker so we'll take the shirt this is a white shirt that we're printing once again we recommend starting out with those lighter garments makes things a lot easier when printing I'll put the shirt up to the top everything's already centered and then simply make sure it's all flat we'll bring the screen down over it and we'll take our squeegee take our squeegee here and then we'll make sure everything is flat down we're going to pull the squeegee now it's very careful to make sure that screen does not move underneath it so we got another print here and then we'll slowly lift this up now this wall the shirt will follow the screen so you got to lift it up a little slower like that there you go and now once again if we're gonna print another short we're gonna flood our screen in this case we're actually going to clean the screen house we're gonna leave it unplug it once we're done printing we want to put all the ink away so we're going to take our ink card bring the ink container over and we're going to scrape the squeegee clean putting all that ink back into the container the more ink you save the less ink you have to buy so if you're careful with cleaning you can really save a lot of money down the road by not having to buy more ink so we're going to scrape that all off there and we're gonna set that aside we're going to come under the screen and do the exact same thing scrape it all off we want to do this after we've done our final print and we don't want to reload the screen so if you notice we've left the image open here because we're cleaning now we're going to take the squeegee and the screen over to the sink to wash out we're to throw the card away and cap the ink to print moisture later with it to clean your screen and squeegee you want to get as much ink out as possible before it gets in the sink so you another way to clean is you can take a wet rag and kind of come in here and this is water-based ink so it cleans up very nicely I'm using the loves of course so you want to get as much of this ink off the screen as squeegee as possible you can even spray a little bit of that degreaser soap on there which makes that ink degrade a little bit easier and kind of suds up you do not want to spray any of that amoled remover on unless you're trying to reclaim the screen itself now I typically like doing the first round of cleaning with the with the tape still in so now that that's clean we're gonna take our nozzle and we're going to go ahead and erase the rest of it off with water now this is water-based once again so does a very nice job of cleaning up does come off you can get it on a surface or something like that you can't wash it off with warm water and soap what we're trying to do is get all this ink residue off we don't want to spray big globs of ink down the drain it's not friendly for the environment even though this is water base still has pigment and stuff in there and for this we're using a little bit warm water and it works great see how easy that your screen cleans up now if we're gonna save the stencil save the screen we don't want to get it too wet so I'm just gonna flip it over and clean the underneath of that and then once again a good way to dry just to take it outside and let it dry in the Sun that'll dry that on real nice so that's all done I'm gonna take that outside let dry in the Sun we're gonna do the same exact thing for the squeegee just springing the rest of that ink residue off with a nice warm or hot water cleans up real easily and then we'll set this aside to dry as well if you're done screen printing for the day and you don't want to keep your screen you can reclaim your screen by using the emulsion stripper so what we're gonna do here is we're going to take this we're going to fill it the rest of the way up with water once again just use a little bit of water there no the rest of the way up and then put your spray nozzle on this will actually take your stencil out now very important when taking your stencil out or moving or stripping the emulsion pressure is super important now I'm we're gonna try to do this in the sink and I think we're gonna work out okay but if you did it let's say with the garden hose or even better yet a pressure washer it's gonna work so much better so we're going to spray the screen down with a generous amount of a moles remover on either side of it to rinse it out and this is gonna permanently remove the emulsion so that we can then degrease the screen and start the process all over again now next we're gonna get our scrub brush this is not the same scrub brush we used for the greasing I recommend getting like two Rubbermaid containers are putting one for stripper one for a mold remover I mean stripper and then the other one for degreaser so that we can keep them separate then get this wet and then start scrubbing down the screen and you might need to use a little bit more and more to remover than less so if you need a little bit more just spray a little bit more on and this will start to take out the image in your screen once again you want to do this in a protected environment so if you're using a kitchen stay you know protect that with this that trash bag or something like that and then you want to scrub both sides of the screen roll aggressively to kind of educate and take out that emulsion one tip is you never ever want to let this emulsion remover or mobile stripper dry on the screen very very bad if you let it dry it will permanently lock that emulsion or stencil into your screen you'll never get it out so you want to keep it wet keep scrubbing it so you see the image degrade like we're seeing on the screen right here keep in mind the edges of your stencil might be a little bit harder to reclaim so you might need a little bit more moles remover you can either saturate the brush or kind of just take that on mold remover down the side all right once we got that all scraped we're going to scrub down we're gonna take our spray once again stronger the better we're to spray it down so you see those areas towards the corner if I was using a little bit more pressure right now or a pressure washer that would come right off but since we're not using very much pressure we got to use the scrub brush to do that so might take a little bit more scrubbing if you're not using the pressure but the pressure is key and I would recommend that but it does do a pretty good job without the pressure still scrub that in and keep in mind that those areas of the screen you're not gonna be screen printing in those so it's not the end of the world if they don't come out all the way a little chunk of emulsion on the corner like that's not going to really hurt anything okay once your screens all the way rinsed out like we see here we can apply the degreaser the screen degreaser and start the process all over again okay DIY screen printers now it's time to move on and print some posters and use the screen printing press first before we print we need to level the press so to do that we're going to use two half-inch wrenches or two Crescent wrenches we're gonna make sure the press is flat and it has a little bit of off contact meaning it has a little space underneath the screen to allow that ink to bounce or transfer screens are like trampolines so that kind of need to bounce that ink onto the substrate this is much more important when you're printing on darker it's with white ink so if you move to the thicker inks off-contact becomes very important if you notice it wasn't very important when we were printing using the hinge press and using the simple on contact approach because the inks very thin meant for lighter garments so what we're gonna do is we're gonna first control our tilts we're gonna take our screen press and this works the same as the for color press as the one color press are going to push it all the way down making sure that everything is loose then we're going to take our screen we're going to put it into the screen clamp and we're going to tighten it down once we've tightened it down we now have leveled out our tilt so we're going to take all the tilt screws which is both the bottom and the top and we're going to tighten them all the way down once our tilt is leveled we're going to now play with the off contact so we take the off contact adjustments which are back here and we're going to loosen them up so we can raise or lower the screen now it's very important to do this evenly so you can do this the easiest way by taking a piece of let's say 1/8 inch paper or cardboard or even better something a little bit more solid like mylar or let's say Plexiglas and you put that underneath the screen so I'm just going to demonstrate by using the stack of poster paper so I put that underneath the screen and then I level it out by raising up the screen off contact and dropping it into place so I'm late dropping the screen into place all the way and I'm allowing that off-contact to rest and let that screen settle into the position so we got ever that pushed all the way down we have these loose for the screen can lower and raise evenly and once it's all settled over that even off contact plate we're going ahead and take our half-inch wrench ratcheting wrenches work a lot easier here we're going to tighten this down this makes it very simple to do off contact adjustments we have about an eighth inch of spacing and it's even from the front to the back of the screen so once we're all tightened down there we can now raise the screen up and then lower it again and we're checking and we feel that the screen has an even balance all the way across the screen which was exactly what we're looking for there so we had even off content they're ready to align the print one more thing on off-contact is we can take a little washer like this and because these screens are a little bit bigger we can take this screen and on that back edge of the screen we can put this washer which holds it up and gives us a little bit of off contact immediately so that helps hold it up on the edge of the screen so as you pull the squeegee across or push the squeegee across its even now I'm going to draw a center line down my platen reason I'm doing this is because if you remember we have center lines down our screen so it makes it centering very very simple I'm using a sharpie or a magic marker to do that drawing a bold center line using a t-square down the center of the platen right there now we have a nice center line down the center of our platen we can come and we can align our screen now I can actually see the center marks in the screen and I can align the top and the bottom Center marks directly to the top and the bottom of the center line so everything's nice and Center and I can even little eye on my paper or mush my shirt to that center line so everything's consistent and even so everything's centered out we have a good off contact let's print some poster paper to print poster paper first we need a little bit of our tack adhesive our DIY adhesive not a ton just a little bit to hold the paper down so you just put a little bit out like that for t-shirts we need a little bit more but it works the same way so we're just gonna take that kind of spread that over the portion of the poster paper now you can either thin this down if it's too sticky or REIT akha fie it by using a warm wet wet rag so a wet rag with warm water can either clean it off or also make it tacky again so if it's too strong it's way to thin it down or if it's not strong enough it's the way to kind of clean it up and then apply more so now we're going to set our poster paper down and we're going to set it even top to bottom and even in center so if we want to we can even get a little bit more concise with this take our t-square we can align the bottom and then draw a line at the bottom to make sure it's even every single time so we know exactly in the center and the side we can draw a line up which makes it very consistent we're looking down over our print making sure we're Center we're a little bit low there so we're gonna lift it up pull it a little bit up like that so I know that pretty much on this print my paper has to come up to the top and I can see it centered out now for a two color printing this is a one color print so do a two color printing you definitely have to get out the Sharpie or alignment tool or you can even take int cards and kind of make jigs by putting one int card here one ink card right here and one ink card down here to kind of make a three-point jig to set in your paper so it hits the same spot every single time because you do one color at a time typically one color let it dry and then come realign the paper and do the second color on top of that after it's dried this is a one color print so it does the same way as far as screen printing it but centering it is a little bit more important on to color prints so we're going to do this in red ink a good way to use these cleanup cards is to cut them in half they go a lot longer and they dip in these small containers a little easier and we're going to put a little bit of ink on the bottom enough to coat the screen now the DIY poster kits include bigger screens that have higher mesh the higher mesh have smaller holes it's a 230 mesh meaning 230 threads per square inch those smaller holes retain the ink up in the mesh retaining fine detail and lying less ink to be printed through we don't need as much ink on paper as we do on t-shirts so that's why it has a little bit higher mesh first of all we're going to flood our screen up so we're going to keep that screen nice and flooded same way we did with poster or we're t-shirt printing we're gonna flip it off all the way at the top there and then we're going to start on top we're going to push back on this so we're starting on top and then we're pushing back and typically one pass will do it but we're going to do another pass just to make sure now if you notice that screening cleared it's not sticking the paper that's what off-contact is important for it's not sticking the paper it's cleared all the way up it's bouncing back up so now we're going to lift it up and we have a beautifully printed DIY poster they're rock and roll so now we can do another poster this goes pretty quick and easy now as we go to production printing it's very important to keep a good amount of ink in the screen you want to make sure that ink there's enough ink in that screen so that screen is able to flood all the way from top to bottom so we're going to start on top this image is a little bit big for this screen it would definitely work a little easier if we had a little bit bigger screen or a little bit smaller image then we flood up after we're done we place our squeegee in the bottom your second poster board one more poster printing is pretty fun and it can go very very fast now for this final print because this is our last one we're going to leave the screen with the ink all the way at the bottom of the screen much so that we can clean it out easily now we're gonna see what this print looks like on a shirt - to load a shirt on the platen is a little bit different you want to make sure to open that shirt all the way up most shirts have center lines on them so you get them all the way open like so and then you can kind of see that center line on the platen so you put that centre line to the center line on the platen that's why it's important to have everything nice and Center and then you'll put it all the way on the platen like so all the way like that and then you lift the shirt up so it's not stuck to the sticky platen and pull it off so once again we're putting it all the way on like that and then we're lifting it up and pulling it back allowing it to rest down nice and smooth we typically want our print start about 3 fingers down so right here if I take a look at this I'm a little bit low so I need to lift up again and move it to the top so once I have my placement I want to take a sharpie or marker and Mark that on the platen so I put a little mark right there so when I come to do my next shirt I know exactly where it's going to be going so now I flatten it down then flood up and we're gonna print back we're gonna do that again because this is a little bit higher mesh if we have the 161 56 mesh but probably only need to do that once but because this is 230 you want a good amount of pressure you want to make sure that ink is clearing if you don't feel confident that you have enough pressure you can lift up but it's better to do it in a down position so flood up you don't want to put a lot of pressure in the flood position and then print back all the way back now once again this is our last print so we're done printing we're gonna leave that ink on the bottom of the screen and there's our print looking great so there's our DIY print on the shirt and we'll take that and we'll use a heat gun flash dryer or an iron to cure that as we wrap up this DIY screen printing tutorial we want to encourage you to continue on with the process there's a lot of variables in screen printing especially be my screen printing well you don't have all the optimal tools and tricks but what you can do is you can never give up and if you never give up you're gonna have success now if you need help you can contact us we have support desk and library so if you go to our website and click the support desk you can find all of our tutorials and articles over a thousand articles over a thousand videos that help you screen print you can also chat with us online send us an email or call us toll free so here are a couple of tips and tricks specifically to DIY screen printing first is your film positive it's got to be dark and your screen has to be coated in a light safe environment with a very thin stencil if your films not very dark investing in a better printer that makes a darker film will make your life way better the screen is so important in screen printing if you have a bad screen you're gonna make a bad shirt but as you'll find out if you have a good screen even by putting it on the hinge on the tabletop you're gonna make a good shirt so making that screen super important another thing to keep in mind when you're printing posters and with thicker ink like white ink is off contact you want about an even eighth inch between your screen mesh and your substrate if your span that your screen mesh is sticking to your substrate erinc isn't releasing rays if the off contact add it off contact tab and your whole world will change your print will look a little bit better and finally curing got to make sure that your ink secure especially on so investing in curing sources is a good investment okay so you've mastered that simple one to color stuff in DIY screen printing and it's time to take it to the next level or here are a few ways you can do that one is you can come to a ryan at screen print experience class we have classes all throughout the country that help you learn to advance your screen printing skills another is you can add more colors to your game we have a full line of colors water-based inks from green galaxies including our awesome common white neptune blue and a ton others next you can add screen printing presses and really up your game as far as the ability to print more consistently and more colors so if you're starting out with hinges you can add a one color press or you're starting out with a one color press you can have four color press and we even had six color presses and Randy Hopkins presses that are bigger than that and those are just a few ways you can up your DIY screen print game now remember all the stuff that came in your kit all the supplies can reorder on our website if you have any questions I want to get just contact us so from here DIY screen printing is completely up to you you can use it to create your brand share your voice or maybe even an inspire a movement why don't you go out there patil eight the world with a bunch of awesome shirts and have fun doing it yourself as a DIY screen printer you

Channel: Ryonet

Views: 375,885

Keywords: diy screen printing kit, diy print shop, diy screen print, ryonet screen printing starter kit, diy print shop classic table top screen printing kit, diy screen printing, how to use a diy print shop kit, screen printing starter kit, ryonet, screen print supplies, diy screen printing press, t-shirt printing, screen printing, diy, screen printing dvd, screen printing 101, yudu screen printing kit, t-shirt, how to screen print tutorial, how to screen print dvd, silk screening

Id: 2aPFzaqPvW8

Length: 62min 39sec (3759 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 23 2014