My First Time Screen Printing Puff Ink

[Music] i've been screen printing for around two years now and i just realized that within that time frame i have not tried any of the cool effects stuff that's out there the business side of this kind of spun a little bit out of control on me but in a good way i mean the business grew a lot faster than i could have anticipated and it's left me printing pretty much non-stop to keep up with the demand but because of that i've been stuck in a little bit of rut i guess i've been printing the same one through six spot color style designs just all day every day and it hasn't really left me a lot of time to experiment and venture and see what else is out there because there's a lot of really cool stuff out there that i haven't tried yet so today i'm finally gonna break out of that stupid little rut and i'm gonna try puff printing for the very first time real quick before we get into it though we made you guys something and it's 100 free no strings attached head to our website the link is in the description below you can pick up this cool little helmet skull vector pack dude it's fully editable so you can add your brand name in there add someone else's brand name in there you can do whatever you want to it we just wanted to give something back to you guys but if you do use it please tag us on instagram at roguelabmfg it would be much appreciated so for my first puff print i don't want to just do a single color puff design and call it a day that would be super boring for you guys and super boring for me and i want to have at least a little bit of a challenge here today so instead we're going to do a two color design with some regular ink and some puffing to give the design a little bit of dimension we came up with this kind of baseball inspired roguelab design the game plan here is to print the red as a regular flat print and then the white as a puff to give it kind of like a cool raised edge border effect around the whole thing that's providing this whole thing works i have no idea yet so let's get into it we're gonna go with three screens to make this thing the first we're laying down an underbase something that i've noticed kind of commonly in puff printing is people avoiding the underbase stage because obviously the ink is puffing up it's got tons of opacity so they probably feel like you don't need it and while in those same prints i've also noticed a lot of puckering going on and puckering and puff printing is after it rises up it essentially just collapses down on itself this can happen for a number of reasons according to the little bit of research on this topic that i've done but in the back of my head i think it needs some kind of a structure underneath it to build up from so we're going to lay down an underbase with a 110 mesh which should give us a nice solid base to put the puff ink on top of plus we already need an underbase anyways for the second color the red that's going in there so why not extend it out to the entire design then we're going to hit it with a 230 mesh to lay down the red because we don't need a ton of that to go down and then we're going to use another 110 mesh to lay down the puff ink and finish this thing off the puff ink has these little spheres that expand under heat and that's how the puff happens we'll call them the puff molecules well the puff molecules have to make their way through the mesh somehow and if you use too fine of a mesh all of them might not pass through there and you won't get a proper puff out of it so we're going to use a 110 mesh to make sure those little bastards make their way through and give us a nice puff at least i think we'll find [Music] out [Music] before i try this out i'm going to run a couple tests just to make sure i'm getting the right amount of puff out of this stuff which is what the screen with the four random squares is for for the puff i'm going to be using the will flex new puff base this is a puff base not a puff additive and i just learned that there is a big difference between the two a few nights ago i had a long call with colin from ryonet every once in a while we'll get these super mega print nerd conversations going we get weird with it he is an absolute print wizard he knows pretty much everything about everything and he completely filled me in on the difference between this stuff versus a puff additive so i'll give you a little recap so puff additive has a very highly concentrated amount of those little puff molecules in there and you would add anywhere between i don't know 10 to 20 percent into any of your inks to get it to do the whole puff effect thing and that's probably what i would have tried to do with this had i not talked to colin whereas this this is actually meant for a mixing system this works with the wilflex pc system i believe or maybe one of the other ones i don't know i don't have that system so with this this already has the amount of puff molecules in there that you want and you would essentially just add pigment into there to make it whatever color you want it to be and it's ready to print so that means i've witnessed with my own eyeballs people use this stuff incorrectly and i definitely would have done the same thing had i not had that conversation i've seen people say i've used a crazy amount like 50 in my ink mixture and it really didn't puff that much this stuff sucks whatever but the reality is they should have been going 70 80 even 90 into their ink mixture to get the right amount of puff going on so with these little test squares i'm gonna run one that's just 100 puff base that's just for fun to see what it does and i'm going to run one that's like a 90 10 mixture an 80 20 mixture in a 70 30 mixture to see just how much puff versus white pigment i'm getting to find the right one that's gonna look good with this [Music] design so that's a bit of an interesting result i'm glad i'm running tests right now i taped off my underbase so i could see bass versus no bass and to my surprise all the ones that had underbase hardly even puffed at all it did a little bit but it's barely noticeable the only one that actually puffed was the one that i put straight up new puff base over top of the white and the ones with no underbase they actually puffed a fair amount but the only one that puffed the amount that i was actually hoping for was the one that had no white pigment at all added to it and that's not gonna work going no underbase onto a black garment so i'm gonna have to try something different here as i see it right now i've got two options the first one is to try doing the clear puff base as my underbase and then putting white over top of that or completely change the idea of the design and switch the white to black so i could add just a little bit of black pigment to that puff base because obviously the more ink or pigment whatever i'm adding into there i'm diluting down the amount of puffs so with black i should be able to get enough opacity from just a little bit going in there and still get the maximum amount of puff effect with this certain product i'm gonna have to eat my words from earlier when i was talking about the people who don't put underbases under these things clearly there is a reason for that at least with this certain product so if you're one of those people i apologize i was wrong [Music] so i went through a few different versions i had to spot gun myself almost head to toe i'm so covered in ink i filled and cleared that stupid little screen so many times to figure this out so the first attempt with just doing puff base flashing it putting white on top was meh i attempted to do the thing where i mix black in there but i discovered that when this stuff cures it goes from clear to white so when it did that it turned it into this weird gross looking light gray color and that was not appealing whatsoever so yeah that's not gonna work out but the discovery of that stuff turning from clear to white as it cures gave me the idea to just try doing a print flash print with nothing but the puff base on its own so i did this on some hoodie fabric because it's thicker and a lot more stable and this is exactly what i was looking for it's bright white it's puffy as all hell this is definitely what we're gonna move forward with so we're gonna try rocking this thing out on a hoodie i first have to make a new underbase screen because this one clearly has the whole design where now we just want to under base the red on its own this screen here that we did for the puff portion that one can stay that one will just fill with the clear puff base on its own and hopefully this turns out cool [Music] our new under-based screen is loaded up so we're ready to go but a video just wouldn't be a video without a quick word from our favorite channel sponsor skillshare skillshare is an online learning community filled with thousands of classes to help you learn all kinds of creative new things for only 10 bucks a month you can learn how to create designs like this one we're working on now all day long even if you're a total beginner and actually you can learn how to create a design very similar to this one by following along with this class by andrew brooks on simple shadow effects in adobe illustrator and since they're sponsoring today's video skillshare is giving away a free trial membership to the first 1000 of you guys who join the community by using the link in the description below so check that out you know i'll be on there in my free time learning some new stuff got a fresh independent ind 4000 let's do this thing [Music] well it worked i guess i gotta be honest with you this kind of looks like shit to me i did get the desired amount of puff out of this thing it raised up a solid eighth of an inch or so off the garment which is pretty cool and it did create that border effect that i was hoping for i also got very minimal to no puckering going on here which is pretty awesome for my first time ever trying this and i guess if there's one thing i do like it's the little raised letters up over top of the main design that did turn out pretty cool but as for the rest of this thing it's just really not turning out the way that i saw it in my head and i don't think it's going to i think this is kind of the best that it's going to get i do want to flip this thing over and try it one more time though just to make sure of that i also did make a mistake in this one i think on the very first layer of puff ink i either drove it into the fabric too hard or i over flashed it but whatever happened i ended up pulling some of the fibers through the top layer of puff ink and it kind of gave it an effect like it's just really dirty or something you can see like little bits of the fibers in there and it's just not that nice so i'd like to try and fix that if i can i'm gonna give this one more shot [Music] this one definitely went better i had a much lighter hand this time when i was laying down the puff portion of the ink and it eliminated that whole thing of pulling up the fibers and i actually got a little bit more puff out of this one which was kind of a cool discovery but yeah this this sucks this is not something that i would ever wear and i would not want to see anybody wearing this i think this whole idea in my head is not going to work out this might have been better suited to inverting the whole thing and maybe printing the white regular and puffing the red that might have been cool but yeah i still don't have high hopes for that but i'm gonna try one more thing since we already wasted a hoodie and i've got all this real estate here i think i'm just gonna try laying down the puff by itself i'm gonna lay down like four hits of it though this time and see just how much that stuff will pop up and see just see what that looks like [Music] well this thing's actually kind of dope this is more or less the effect that i was kind of hoping for but yeah this is clearly not the way to go about it i flashed this thing three separate times which means i laid down four different ink layers and it built it up and made it kind of like a high density print and it made it super smooth compared to the other puff stuff which is pretty cool but i mean i did flash it three times and i kind of over flashed on one of them and you can see i dye migrated the crap out of this thing so this is definitely uh this one's definitely garbage too but otherwise the effect that i got out of it it's pretty cool and that's actually pretty good to know because high density is something that i'm definitely going to experiment with next because that can get real crazy and now i know a couple little things i can bring into that but there's still a bit of real estate left on this hoodie to fit one more in there and i always want to keep going i want to try exactly what we talked about on the last little break is switching it up with doing the white as a flat and doing the red as a puff just to get that out of my head because otherwise if i don't i'm always going to wonder what it would look like so let's do that well that one went pretty much exactly as i thought it would after i started doing it i already knew that i wasn't gonna get a good red because the way this base turns white after it's cured but i kind of just wanted to see the concept and yeah really uh didn't do a whole lot you saw that i obviously didn't do a real scientific mixture when it came to putting the ink with the base but i kind of just eyeballed like a 70 30 mixture and yeah it diluted down the puff base too much to the point where this doesn't really look like a puff print it puffed up a little bit but not enough to where you know it's a puff print it more or less just looks like a print that someone did a shitty job on but at least i laid my weight down nice i do however think that there's potential with this version of it but i'm gonna have to revisit this whole puff thing with a puff additive rather than a base because i'll have way more control over the amount of puff obviously i'll be able to use colors a little bit more freely and just a few more things if i had the mixing system that went along with this base it might be a different story but now at least we know what this bass does and now i know there's a difference between a bass and an additive because two days ago i had no idea i'm a little bit bummed i didn't get the effect that i wanted out of this i saw this going way differently in my head but it's been a little while since i've completely failed in a video so you're welcome for that i guess but i think the only route to take to get to where i want to go is to go with high density printing and that's going to be a lot of stuff to learn there's so much shit in that avenue of printing to know it's crazy but it's something i've wanted to learn for a very long time and now i have a pretty good excuse to start making the time to do that and learning is kind of what this is all about right i'm gonna go order up some puff additives so that we can revisit this whole thing in a little while but if any of you guys out there have experience with puff printing and want to share it please leave it in the comments down below so that when we revisit this thing next time that maybe it's a little bit more successful thank you guys for watching please drop a thumbs up on this thing for me and keep putting in that work oh that's annoying idiot so i want to try that one more time and see if i can get a are you serious i have tried spitting out that sentence like 10 times and i was this close and this stupid thing i don't know why i can never remember to turn it off wheels what are you doing you're not even allowed in here how'd you get in what are you doing get out you know the drill you're not allowed in here wow that looks like shit i guess we're making a fail video today [Music] you

Channel: Lee Stuart

Views: 33,601

Rating: 4.9426007 out of 5

Keywords: lee stuart, leestuart38, lee stuart 38, lee stewart, screen printing, puff ink screen printing, puff ink printing, puff ink, puff plastisol ink, first time screen printing, screen printing at home, screen printing for beginners, how to screen print, wilflex, wilflex puff, screen printing tutorial, t shirt printing, silk screen printing, ryonet, screen print, screen, printing, how to, silk screen, screen printing tips, screen printing business, custom shirts, screen print shop

Id: ayMHLccHQy8

Length: 15min 4sec (904 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 17 2020