DTG Or Direct To Garment Versus Screen Printing: A Detailed Comparison

[Music] hello everyone and welcome to another educational video about screen printing like at Smith productions today we're going to take a quick look at director garment versus screen printing okay because a lot of people in the industry when you're starting out in getting involved with printing or decorating or embellishing garments or t-shirts you know sometimes you might look at director garment as a you know valid or viable solution to starting at home except that there are you know there's a few things to consider and today what we're going to do is we're going to take a field trip over to a grammatical art here in the Arizona Phoenix Arizona area and visit with our good friend Natalie she did a testimonial video for us as I'm sure you remember and she screen prints but she also does direct the garment and she has a pretty successful business that I think it's kind of found that you know around Etsy she does a lot of work on Etsy a lot of business on Etsy but she has a website and everything you know so Natalie was very gracious and super awesome and allowing us to come over on a Saturday okay while she had to have a babysitter and everything okay she was just so great Thank You Natalie I really appreciate it so much and we had a good time it was working on the weekend but I had fun I had some fun Natalie's a great woman Supergirl and so this video let me get on to the point this video is about the jack white arm that I made and shared on Instagram so if you follow me on Instagram you know what I'm talking about I am going to see jack white next week a Comerica theater here in Phoenix Arizona and I really enjoy Jack I you know the simplicity of what he does in the way that he makes it extraordinary is just brilliant to me you know a lot of his stuff not all of it because he's he's actually a pretty accomplished guitarist and he's I mean you know some people may argue that he's not the greatest technical guitarist but that's not the point okay he's an artist and he's really good at what he does and he takes very simple things and kind of arranges them in a extraordinary complex manner that makes them something more than they are or were or I don't know so I love this I love this because I play rhythm guitar and I enjoy screwing around with simple rhythms that are kind of based and sound more than anything I don't know if that makes any sense I'm not sure what I'm talking about and by the way I don't know how to play guitar I mean I can fake it but yeah it's not like I'm some kind of technical guitarist like the guy the guy who did my intro music right William Taylor right if I can remember and I apologize will the fight forget but I can look it's been a little while he's - he redid my intro music and it's really cool it was based on a rhythm that I created in high school and stuff so yeah so I like music a lot and so let's go over to Natalie's place and learn a little bit about direct-to-garment while we print some shirts that I'm gonna I'm gonna wear one and I'm gonna take one and maybe throw it at Jack on the stage hopefully I won't get kicked out or anything alright so I don't know I made it to where really all right so so let's go over to that in this place and take a look at the rack the garment versus screen printing alright so we finally made it over here to Natalie's place and you guys probably remember Natalie from a testimonial video she did for me a little while back that was very cool of you and she's helping us out again today so we're gonna look at this whole directed garment thing because you do some direct to garment and screen printing and you do novelty type shirts is what we would kind of call them in the industry so tell us a little bit about that yes so I own grammatical art so it's like grammar science all things nerdy so I'm a direct-to-consumer screen printer and I also implemented DTG about four years ago cool okay so that means where can we find you online so grammatical art comm and also grammatical art Etsy comm all right cool so you what you do is you have different designs that you've created and you have them online for sale and you basically print them as they're ordered a lot of them okay so what you employ is both techniques of screen printing Natalie has a little bit of a screen printing setup right here in the same room and then for other types of stuff she will use the director garment yeah so we're going to look at that today we're printing that shirt right the Jack white shirt that I told you about earlier we're gonna print that so we're gonna let you watch the shirt be printed as we ask Natalie some questions about doctor garment versus screen printing okay so a lot of the time the first thing that you need to do is pretreatment when you're doing the white underbase so what's that all about with the pretreatment and the white underbase yeah so you have to pretreat a garment and that's so the white ink has a surface to sit on otherwise the white ink is too heavy it'll sink into the shirt and you won't really get an opaque print so it's to stick and to also have vibrancy and also talking about vibrancy you can also pretreat like if you really wanted to have really bright colors again it's it's more on the pretreatment surface as opposed to sinking into the shirt okay so we're gonna do that right now so let's see how that works so the first thing that you have to do is you actually need to press your shirt to get any moisture out of it because you don't want to print on a wet shirt alright so so we're getting humidity and moisture out of the cotton and what's what not what is this is it up yeah the blends on there like for what is this one this one's a fifty fifty one fifty fifty poly so with DTG without pretreatment it at least at least for my printer the inks it needs to be fifty percent cotton to stick to it without issues right that's correct we'll talk more about that so now that we've gotten the moisture out of this shirt so pretreatment the other thing too is pretreatment is the most critical step by far in DTG if you don't have a good pretreat you're not going to have a good print your so um so what I do is I manually pretreat it's just because of my business model in the way that I print shirts there are pretreatment machines that you can get that can quicken the process but we're just in a manually pretreat yeah and I just have a spray bottle that kind of makes it easier so what I do is I am going to lay the pretreatment down on the print area so this is something that I've learned over time in my business how much pretreatment you need because if you don't have enough you're not gonna have an opaque print and if you have too much the ink will kind of slough off later and washability Wow so there's a lot of details Sirians being good yeah DTG yep so and what I'm gonna do so I've sprayed it I think that I have a good base on this I'm going to hover it this dry and this is just another method that I've learned over the years is to hover it to dry and then right before it's done drying you hit it with the the heat press and get a lock in the pretreat in there so how long do you hover until it's almost done so it's gonna be about 45 seconds it's not too long it's pretty quick yeah and then the pressing is what just so it's a bow on it depends on how much moisture is still left in there but between 45 and 90 seconds so the other thing that we can talk about too so I love this bottle this is a new thing so you can do like a you know standard bottle that's fine but this one as you pump it yeah yeah it gives you an Eton or even things so in the industry a lot of people use that like the Wagner paint sprayers yeah and those are good but I can run this in my house right in this little staging area right like all right so one more thing before we actually start printing this awesome shirt that I created what is this machine you have what kind of machine do you have so I have the Epson sure color f2000 so it has six ink cartridges so I have two white one yellow I have it with the six hundred mils per cartridge they all load in that way I have the white edition there's also a color Edition then on this side you just have your magenta cyan black Sam Wow that's pretty cool okay so what's come in closer and see how this thing works sounds good so I'm going to load the shirt on it's a little bit different than screen printing you can thread it I find that it's easiest to kind of lay it on top to Center it the best so I use a tuck lock platen it's better than the the hoop system in my opinion so it just kind of tucks into the foam here I check my alignment make sure it looks a little crooked so I'm gonna check it you just check just like anything else check your shoulders shoulders look good so I'm gonna go ahead and start this so when this is printing so what it does first is it weighs down the white base layer first then it's going to do a pause to kind of just let that gel for a couple of seconds then it's going to go back in and then lay the color over it so when you pretreat it the particular pretreatment that I use is meant for white ink and what that means is you'll see it in the design it's going to put white under every part of the print area so there are some rips that you can buy some some software that can help you reduce that a little bit I don't use that personally but there's definitely value in doing that okay so what do you think about the color wash ability the durability and longevity of DTG compared to screen crane their different rate so and also what we talked about earlier with the pretreatment pretreatment is critical you can't have too little or you're not going to get a good print you can't have too much or it's going to wash out so you were in that overtime and you get the best wash ability so my DTG is that so the the difference that I have in the wash ability is not so much that the ink doesn't last but it's more that the celebration like not so much for this design but if we were doing this on a white shirt it goes the ink goes more into the shirt so just over time as those wash you just get the little fibers coming through we see something similar but screen printing is on top of the garment with plastisol inca specially it's on top yeah you can kind of get that with water-based inks you can't get that ashy look yeah over time but that's correct yeah and it's it's interesting see the number three is actually black get white under there yep so so what this is going to do yeah so we're gonna I wish that well I wish that white were a little more opaque but we'll see how this comes out learn so what what about like the intensity of colors like screen printing inks especially plasti Saul's are very bright and intense and colorful and so how does that compare just the color rendering ability even for color garment the color is pretty amazing right so you you there are some limitations in that but I have a full spectrum of colors that I can hit and hit brightly white underbase helps a ton right so when you do a white underbase you'll see I think in this print you'll see a lot that the colors will come through pretty vibrant like I said there's limitations like I can't do neon colors with DTG right like I can't do a true neon the Russians you can't rape yes science Yeah right that's not how that works right but there there are ways that you can kind of mimic those so you can lighten up your green you can do those things so yeah so yeah now you know as we're actually sitting here watching this thing print how long do you think this shirt will take to print does it tell you on the computer it doesn't give me a time estimate but it's usually about two like for this size print that's probably gonna be two minutes if we were to look at like a timing about two minutes you know for this kind this is a five color print actually I believe if I remember I counted them last my red DTG yes that's correct because I only needed a couple of shirts and you know why would I set this up but you know what about the speed on this particular job I would say that it's in this case it's faster now because we don't have to print five colors on a rotary press no but in general the speed of direct-to-garment compared to screen printing can be a little bit slower yeah totally right so it and it all depends so like four five colors this would be faster but like a one color and I do do quite a bit of one color printing if I were doing a high run of them I would do screen printing every time but if I'm doing one for a customer right now that's where director garment kind of is awesome is for the lower volume complex jobs right because for instance if we wanted to compare if we were to do this five colors white print on an automatic press and we were printing a thousand pieces in that scenario we could print them faster with screen printing yeah so it all depends on the the scenario or the situation the specific job what you're doing and the volume and the complexity of the job yeah correct yeah yeah so with this one there I think there's a couple things going on this could use a little bit more pretreatment and also when I saw it come out the white wasn't as opaque as I would have wanted so just like screen printing I'd go in and I'd hit it again with white kind of cancel the job hit it again so what like at this point you could hit it again now this is this is you have to do a new shirt I would have to do this yeah so in that respect it is like screen printing you have to set up a job on press and print it and then realize that you know what it's not working out the best I get to change something so yes yeah let's let's look at a different shirt we'll take a stop here and then get another shirt yeah well and then so another thing another thing too is so on these what we talked about with the white underbase you can see a little bit of the white underbase peeking through so there's their settings in the software where you can we pull that down so I'm going to pull that I'm going to up the white pull back the the white under but let's try that and do it again so for this shirt i've just adjusted my pretreatment levels so hopefully that will help i'm also laying down another layer of white which should help and reduce that under base that we talked about so we'll see how this one goes all right so you know when somebody's looking at the investment for getting in to direct the garment compared to screen printing of course today we're kind of bouncing everything off of screen printing right so what what can somebody expect in the range for a desktop unit like this because there are big giant units of course right the desktop unit such as this what would somebody be looking at possibly so what's interesting right is that I've done both I started up in screen printing a starting package and I started up in DTG right so code it's completely different so screen printing I think I got my entire setup for maybe about a thousand dollars to get floor color press get all the equipment flash dryer things like that for this to get the printer about 15 16 grand at the time and then the heat press I think I'd have to look back at it but what well you know hot Ronna yeah for grand prix for grand can be expensive so all in when I bought my first printer my first heat press and my first set of inks beings are very expensive I'll come back to that about $21,000 it's my starting investment and you know for $21,000 now I could sell you a complete manual shock package with forced air for water-based inks yeah so which meaning water-based done plastisol but in other words it would be a pretty decent shop package for that money so you know and on that like you know so the investment is pretty substantial compared to screened everything screen printing will always be accessible to the masses I think that's what's going to keep it the king of textiles honestly yep and maintenance even me maintaining a manual screen printing press and the dryers and things like that are fairly simple compared compared to this yeah so yes and no so it's again it's different it's kind of apples and oranges so for this I have to make sure that I do my daily maintenance around a printhead do like cleaning around the printhead cleaning my lines at the end of the night like there's a tube washing to make sure that your ink gets out so you it doesn't dry in the line dry in the head so that cost has come down since when I first bought it there used to be more expensive things but I can show it afterwards there is a waste tube so anytime it's kind of recirculating and after it recirculates and then you're cleaning the head it is pushing ink out so coming back to the ink cost each one of those cartridges that I showed you before yeah they're 207 apiece 207 dollars okay so I'd have to calculate it down but I know someone already has done that for us where you're you know flushing you know four to seven dollars worth of ink when you clean right right and before I ask you about clogging sure how much does it cost the release of printhead you have to do that so I have a I have I have a model that has a more expensive printhead so the printhead and the labor to do it about three grand that's pretty hefty yeah yeah and you need it for it to run so do you do you have any idea how often a printhead might break down on your machine you might have an idea but like is it something happens a lot is it regular so so again with this particular unit there are quite a few printhead replacements but I actually think that it's more due to the pump and cap assembly it has like a faulty part over there so that it's not shutting so that your your printhead is drying out so again it's one of those things that like looking at it doing these printhead tests at the beginning of your your day and seeing if you have any clouds and catching those as fast as possible I have saved it so this year alone I've saved a couple of heads because I've caught problems with that particular person and that's that has to do with clogging over that way you have some well drying out well it's sharing of the ink around that head yeah so we're in Arizona right so we're humid so I run a humidifier in in the room to keep my humidity up above 50 which you know again I do that all the time so all the time this machine is under 50% in there / yeah try it yeah yeah you're always humidifying this room yeah and that if we if we lived in the Midwest right I wouldn't have to do it right right yes yeah yeah it's especially dry here we can have what do we have like 15 to 20 percent you mean yeah right now monsoon season a little higher but yeah yeah yeah yeah so clogging then like of the heads themselves like use yours pretty regularly right well and I and I'm not a daily user so I batch print right because I still have a day job how long do you go in between printing I don't have any problems or no so I print so the reason that I bought this particular machine was that I could print once a week and still be fine so I do print two to three times a week but I do leave it you know if I'm traveling or whatever is going on in my schedule I'll leave it for a week and then I'm good if you're leaving it longer than that there are storage modes that you can put you take the ink out of the lines you put the cleaning solution okay yes so you can kind of mouthal it yeah you had to also look at that look at this pretty nice look here nice yeah we'll take a look at these shirts yeah maybe the print results of course so and the other thing too and and Jonathan and I talked about this before the video so this is my particular unit I know that there are people who kind of modified actual tabletop printers to make them into DT run GG but so I so we talked about my investment this is I think a pretty standard investment like if you're talking about cornets and some of the larger units you know you're talking six-figure yeah there may use down more units but yes absolutely we am I would say that the the unit's under 15,000 those ones that you see that are like six grand and whatnot are not really worth the time you have challenges yeah I think I wouldn't wanna play with readest yeah I would go with a name-brand product you know so they you have excellent support or whatever support you can write you know but yeah I think going with a name-brand is much better than a modified thing from a private person so can you tell me a little bit maybe about the cost you know per shirt of printing like how much does it cost to print a shirt like this you know yeah DTG inks and stuff being what they are and you know comparatively to screen printing and evidently you have a little way to figure it out I do I do so I mean I have an Epson DTG printer so it's an ink company so there's they have good inks but they're not cheap inks right so like I said each cartridge is about two hundred and seven dollars for each cartridge so it's gonna lay down quite a bit of white as you can see which is going to be the most expensive part most expensive part of our print because it's laying so much more compared to the other inks right and so in mine again I'm using the OEM software so the garment creator for Epson so in there there is an estimator so you put in what you're paying for your ink and then it estimates how many milliliters are used for this print so let me pull that up just I'll talk about it so I pay 207 per 600 milk art Ridge so this one has an image area a hundred and two square inches and it's going to use a little over six milliliters so what this is doing so we did we are laying down more white ink for this particular design because we didn't like the results the first time so what this is doing is laying down ink the white ink then it's gonna go back lay waiting again and then our colors but it's going to be about six mils total of everything shake does it it doesn't tell you what that cost how much gives this shirt cost yeah so the shirt costs two dollars and sixteen cents to print to print an inch art itself cost us what I have to look at me to about three dollars yeah okay so cost us about $5.25 maybe yeah and then pretreatment oh forgot 30 HP about 30 cents 30 cents so Wow yeah so 550 60 or so yeah that's our cost of this shirt yep okay so obviously with screen printing it's a lot harder to determine costs because we don't have the fancy computer to help us but you know again generally speaking if you are comparing to printing this on an automatic press of a high volume the cost per shirt with screen printing would be much lower for printing it would be literally be pennies right for the ink and mostly probably on screen printing your labor your printer would be your biggest cost not so much the ink and supplies for printing the shirt in fact you know big runs hot the shirts that are sold in the hundreds or 200,000 piece level get printed at like you know 25 50 cents apiece yeah yeah so that's where you know screen printing is more you know it's better suited is that grammatically correct yeah yeah better suited you know for high-volume whereas direct the garment is is awesome for stuff like we're doing today yeah for businesses like yours right and so so in my business where I specialize is you know I'm doing designs I'm selling them direct to consumers so I like to try out a prototype yeah I like to prototype out see if they sell and then if I do sell volume if I have a higher volume I will burn a screen right like if I write so color meaning you'll prototype of one color yep so they well Natalie will do a one color design on the director garment when you're not sure right if the design will sell and then if it sells you screen printer correct okay so prototyping is very cool that's that's pretty interesting actually so what kind of what kind of problems other than some of the ones we've mentioned yeah kind of other problems might you throw out there that people wouldn't expect or or something you ran across yeah so so we talked about the maintenance and when something does go down it's not like you pop a screen and you can make a new screen and you can be back up I'm running so if my printhead point yeah so if my printhead goes down and I have to wait for that part to come in one to two days pay a service person to come out and repair that for me I can be down and it happened to me a last Christmas season last December my printhead went down and it took three days to get back up and running three days still phenomenal like that's that's great for what we're doing but three days of when I'm printing every single day I'm three days behind yeah yeah yeah during your busiest season right basically right so what other what are the problems could we have what kind of what kind of lectric Allah does this thing take so this the printer itself I'd have to look at the specs again but it's only a few amps it's it's not it's so you can run it I can run in a how he'd like hi juice it doesn't right certainly need 220 power this would be 120 or 115 correct power cran the amperage would probably be very low because it's kind of like a computer printer I mean after all yes just a big one yes so the bigger power draw with this is for the heat press and we didn't talk about the heat press and why that's that's needed so we you can tunnel dry these right right but these water-based DTG inks take two to three minutes to fully cure like you could ramp it up scorch your your t-shirt if you but so you would need a very long tunnel there are people who do it yeah I think what they use is a forced air dryer yes it's a larger dryer in which the belt can be slowed down quite a bit and the ship can go through and it's of course please don't forget that I do sell screen printing equipment supplies at cat spit spray and print supply calm and if you like the information you're receiving in these super awesome educational videos please subscribe to my youtube channel right now it means a lot to me and it makes me motivated it keeps me motivated to keep producing videos free right here on youtube.com for you all to enjoy so make sure to check out cats fit screenprint supply.com if you need screen printing equipment or supplies and subscribe to my youtube today about that hot for staff right which is gonna be really good with the water-based type inks right so that's pretty cool it's very awesome do you have any other thoughts that you might want to give somebody today like if there's somebody's looking at screen printing come you know and dtg2 start a business you have any thoughts that you might tell them they're just different so the thing that I would tell you is you know to do your research you know really find out what you're getting into talk to salespeople that's fine but really talk to people who are using the printers because those are the people who are really living it day in and day out and you can tell you what they think of a printer and and how it's doing for their business the other thing too is like yes these machines can make you a lot of money but it's going to take time to warn these things like you're gonna take it out of the box training or not it's going to take time like I did experiments when I got this I'm a nerdy scientist right but I legitimately pulled out a notebook and figured out how much pretreat how long to cure things all these things to get the best possible print and even now you've seen it I've been doing this for four years now and that first print that we did it was not my favorite print right we dialed it in you do those things but it's something that you you weren't over time but don't get frustrated but this is a significant investment and I think if I were just starting out in the business I would not jump into DTG what I would do is to jump in with a contract printer who has a DTG so you can you're what we talked about like the prototyping you're doing that with somebody else so so they have the Machine they're doing that and you haven't made that ridiculous large investment yeah yeah alright awesome I think that's that that's pretty good your experience you know that that's funny maybe you should go into consulting in the future so so basically you know it's what you're saying is that even though it is a computer printer type thing attached to your computer it's not as simple as clicking and printing and you're good ready to learn the nuances and bright little intricacies of DTG printing in order to get the best prints at the lowest cost and not right not hurt yourself right right and so that's the thing like right now and I get that it's a challenge I too would love to have to be able to print white ink and not have to pretreat that's a really big part of what we've talked about and like I said that's something you're going to have to learn as you go through this you know I think in the future game changers will be you know where we don't have to do this but right now this is our life this has been our life since DTG came out I think it's actually right it's been out a couple decades it's been out quite some time yeah oh yeah and that's what the other thing is where I was used to these machines you know when you wash this that it might fade a little bit but you see now that's different they don't fade as much so I haven't had that extended experience you will get the fill abrasion sometime like I can't tell you that you're not going to have some fibers pulling out sure that's that's why pressing and getting everything in the right direction when you're first doing our stability yeah that's the first wash is it's gonna stay pretty much yeah so like when we can show it after we're cured like in my print in my experience with my inks what you have that first day for this is what you're gonna have right right like anything else so what it's just like screen printing wash inside out be nice to it yeah well I guess the soul inks are pretty tough well yeah well but that's true if you want the best longevity it should be washed inside out yeah absolutely yeah so this is the larger platen this is a 14 by 16 platen and like I talked about it a little bit earlier is that this is the hoop so this is where you lay it down and you kind of put the hoop on it to lock it in place so we talked about the pretreatment there is a there are a few out there but I do work with our TP Apparel so they sell shirts that are already pre treated so all you do is you press them get the moisture out you still don't want to print on a wet shirt right so then you just print on it and it's already pre treated so we talked about before yes you have to pretreat for white or I'm sorry for white ink and then you the other way that people pretreat is to get a vibrant print so that's what I'm going to show you now printing one of my book totes or one of my book prints if you didn't simulate it it would be one two three four five six seven eight eight color yeah so we're gonna do that now so this shirt is actually a shirt you plot that is already pre true correct white which usually most people wouldn't pretreat yeah so but what you're doing so there's a couple things and we'll see it here so it gives you a more vibrant print and it helps with the fill abrasion so like what they show in their marketing material right is that hey this is what it looks like washed and here's what ours looks like washed right yeah so the other thing - so with my particular printer and inks the yellow ink is viscous and it's it's it's not viscous enough it's a pretty thin ink so what it can do is it can bleed into things around it so there's challenges with that color space with the printer so what I have set this print up to do is to lay the yellow down first kind of pause and then the black goes over it so they don't run into each other yeah that's interesting yeah I didn't you know that you can actually tell it what color you want to go down first in this multicolor yeah situation so and I'm not sure like how I know that this is a purpose this is a challenging color space the yellow versus the black and red on black and this is how I've gotten around it so I don't know if Epson like designed it that way yeah this is how they did it but yeah so it's laying down the yellow first and then it'll come behind and print the rest of the colors but it's kind of weird right so you get to see yellow ink like yeah because it's actually CMYK yep here so that's the yellow in all the colors and the yellow and the yellow yeah yeah that's interesting that you can do that [Applause] oh when we were talking about the cost estimator so for this print I have estimated the cost for this and it's about 56 cents this is one of your designs this is one of my designs yep right now you know everybody wants to buy this yellow print on this white shirt right now but I promise you're gonna be impressed in about a minute when it comes back out so but this is so this is where this is actually one of my first designs that I ever came up with in the shop and when I when I first started before I ever screen printed I just did like poster prints rights that people could buy and so when Pete when I started going into screen printing people are like oh I love this design can you do this for me and I was like nope because I wasn't going to burn nine screens and or a simulated CMYK yeah it just wasn't I was not set up to do that yes that but that's some people actually discover that by accident they start designing designs and they don't realize that you know translating it to screen printing is quite the task well right and and as we see people want full-color and so that's just another thing with DTG is you know one color is great and one color is still going to be the crux of a screen printing business but the the DTG can really do these multicolored ones and can do them one-offs so this is one of those designs that you'll print on demand when people order it correct and so you can just pick the size and did they get to choose any like there's only specific color you print this one on or do you have to allow them maybe one or two so because this one is a wider color spectrum because it I want all of these colors to pop I limit it to a few colors you haven't cheers yeah but everything can always be customized right like I printed this on a black shirt you just reverse the black and the white right yes oh yeah another thing I couldn't do another level of customization it would be more difficult to do if I were just trying to screen print this like oh I really love your design but I want it on a black shirt yeah it would be a completely different screen setup yeah artwork and screen setup because when we print on a black shirt and screen printing we use the black of the shirt as the design you know the black in the design so the artwork is completely different as you know from white shirts oh yeah a lot of people don't realize that either especially customers when they're ordering and they they set something up on white and then they want to print it on black in it you know the only way to do it easy is to slap a big white underbase under there and make it into a sweat patch you know which I've done you know some customers only you know they want Oh 200 pieces in white and 12 in black right so it's gonna cost you a lot of money - yeah but they don't they usually are okay if you just do whatever you have to do to to print those 12 but technically you would have to reset everything yeah this is what a matter of do of two different files or you just tell it that it's going on a black shirt and it automatically so there's a little bit that it can do for you like it could ya know so this is look this is the color that you get closer you can do this without messing up the focus too much yeah it's pretty bright so it's bright it gives you a good color space and we can see too like all we can show it after its dried too because I think you you do have a little bit of vibrancy a loss pre-treating helps when you're drying it pre-treating helps with that a bit but this is one of my favorite designs to do and I was talking to Jonathan about it earlier the reason that I actually got a deep purchase a DTG machine to begin with is I wanted to take these prints and do them on demand in-person events so like hey you love this you love this shirt but you don't you hate the color white you do you do not want to own any white shirts in your you know color in your closet so you know hey I want this on a heather gray shirt instead and we can do that for ya and director garment is an absolutely awesome for point of sale I was mentioning out earlier as well you know tourist areas boardwalks you know these types of places where people are traveling and they're very willing to pay more for a shirt that's customized you know and they're not really concerned with longevity on those products really the truth right it's an instant gratification thing that reminds you the trip or whatever for a little while and most people will accept less quality or a novelty shirt printed on demand that point a sound like like a tourist thing you know so this is this is one of your designs and again this you if anybody likes this you can find this grammatical art on the Etsy right and also my dot-com that's grammatical are calm right so the oh and the other thing that I was gonna tell you too is that so this is a labor savings right so buying the shirt - shirt pretreated is a labor savings and what I actually found out when you're comparing this this is a ring-spun cotton t-shirt when you're comparing this to other ring-spun cotton t-shirts it may be a little bit more expensive but it's it's on par with what American Apparel ring-spun cotton shirts right you know what yeah for the us-made type thing so it's still pretty good good price point yeah alright very cool so now we're cure this shirt so we talked about before that this is what we use the heat press for again there there are some other things out there a long conveyor dryer tunnel the forced air there's also like Lawson's has like a like a shirt drawer yeah special DTG yeah they have that thing so for this we've hovered it just let some of the inks kind of off gasket some of that moisture out use the parchment paper this just helps protect the top of your heat press plate from getting too dirty and it just gives a nice even contact everything so for white ink this does need to be cured longer again for my inks for my printer so this has to be cured for 90 seconds on three it's between 330 330 and 338 because this is a heathered with a 50 poly I have it at the 330 because oh it doesn't burn alright so now I'm just kind of let that go and then the other thing too this is just another thing that you kind of learn is 90 seconds is a good starting point right so 90 seconds you should have cure but if you have a lot of white ink on there things like that you still may need to cure it a little bit longer yeah and more it the more ink you print probably the longer it'll take to cure just like with screen printing right so yeah so talking and we don't have to talk too much about this because you keep you're gonna have the longest video ever about DTG but DTG and screen printing are they're similar and different all at the same time right so you still have inks you still have to cure them they're they're just a little bit different so I don't know how long does it take to cure water-based inks because I work on glasses all ah again it's gonna depend on how much you actually print and if you if you're using a forced air dryer or forced air flash cure you know it should be pretty quick probably you know a minute or less yeah you know yeah less you're building up a whole bunch Inc the water-based inks that I sell now I think are carrying it about 280 or so and yeah it's no I think it's probably the plastisol inks are very critical I think probably like the director garment water-based thing I think it's a little bit easier to heat set layer based ink stains you know screen printing ink it stains it's a good stainer you know so you know as long as you heat set it well enough it's it should be easier I think to cure that plastisol you know but yeah it varies there's no set answer to that either how long does it take to cure a shirt it really depends on the shirt some shirts take like for some reason they heat up quicker in the oven than other shirts a thinner shirt will get hot faster than a heavyweight shirt yeah caller also dark shirts will get hotter faster white shirts reflect infrared heat things like that so so it's cool so what when I opens it up and the parchment stuck a little bit that indicates to me that the has moisture it still has moisture the other thing too could be a little bit heavy on the pretreat but it's just again things that you usually I could take us in the weeds all dating them yeah take us into the weeds of all the things that could ever go wrong with yeah and that's that's that's a good thing to emphasize again it's not clicking print you really need to know what you're doing yeah it really is a science and people will people who've done both of these again they're they're two different things but you learn a lot from each one so I've learned a lot from screen printing to take to DTG I've learned a lot from dtg2 take to screen printing all right so that was pretty awesome I had a lot of fun today it's very cool thanks a lot Natalie for having us over you're so awesome we really appreciate your support make sure to check out Natalie online again grammatical art comm anywhere else I'm a tackle art etsy.com that's right Instagram all right Instagram that's right Instagram is very important but grammatical art you can totally Google you I'm pretty sure so very cool thanks a lot for watching today we're gonna head back over to the cat spit shop and wrap it up all right so here is the print close-up so this is direct to garment it's it hasn't been washed yet you have to pre wash you know before you wear them so I'm gonna wash it and probably you know maybe I'll do a follow-up video and show you the wash test next week perhaps but you know it's actually pretty impressive it's very bright and we were actually missing two channels as we you know discovered after we finished shooting you know Natalie took a look at the Machine and there were two white channels missing not printer so if we you know that means they were clogged or something like that and if they were printing this would have be been you know a little bit more heavy coverage a little bit brighter but I think it's pretty cool you know director garment is fascinating and I think you know it has certain applications which it's very well suited for but you know screen printing is about volume and that's that's exactly why we did these two or three shirts with direct garment since this print doesn't have a tremendous amount of ink on it it will probably be very very soft once it's washed so the hand on this particular print I think will be excellent alright everybody thanks a lot for watching um Thank You Natalie a grammatical art make sure to check out her links in the video description below please check out for work online grammatical art calm and you can find her of course on instagram and grammatical art okay so check out the links in the video description below and thank you again Natalie we really appreciate your super awesomeness and I hope that you all enjoyed this video and learned a little bit something more about direct-to-garment versus screen printing thanks a lot for watching and we will see you next time

Channel: CatspitProductions

Views: 40,063

Rating: 4.5732217 out of 5

Keywords: DTG, Direct to Garment, silk screen printing, screenprinting, screen print, screen printing, equipment, supply, supplies, sales, wholesale, resale, Howto, T-shirt (Garment), Do It Yourself (Hobby), screen, printing, screenprint, silkscreen, silkscreening, silk, printed, shirts, tee, shirt, t-shirt, heat, transfers, how, to, garments, textile, tutorial, home, learn, educational, Clothing (Industry), Spot Color, Halftone, Crafts, Diy, Printed T-shirt, ink, print, life, Phoenix, Arizona, fashion, design, logowear

Id: 7tCX0TJt1-g

Length: 48min 50sec (2930 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 17 2018